Clinging To Gender Ideology Mandates Is A Losing Strategy

Washington state just blinked.

In a May 20 settlement that should send shockwaves through every child welfare agency still clinging to gender ideology mandates, the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families agreed to a permanent injunction barring officials from denying or restricting foster care licenses based on applicants’ religious beliefs about marriage, gender, or sexual relationships. 

The settlement in the Washington case did not happen in a vacuum. It followed a jurisprudential earthquake from the Ninth Circuit in Bates v. Pakseresht. Jessica Bates, an Oregon widow who wanted to open her home to two specific children in need, was told she first had to agree to affirm any foster child’s claimed gender identity. She refused not out of animus, but out of conviction that she could not in good conscience speak words she believed to be false.

The Ninth Circuit agreed that Oregon’s policy engaged in viewpoint discrimination and violated Bates’ free speech and free exercise of religion, and ordered the state to allow her to begin the adoption process without first submitting to its ideological litmus test.

Behind the legal filings were families whose experiences put human faces on what can otherwise seem like an abstract legal dispute. Through accounts shared with the appellate court, foster and adoptive parents described years spent welcoming vulnerable children into stable homes. What they could not do was affirm a set of claims about human identity that they believed to be untrue and harmful to the very children they were trying to help.

Vermont offers an equally stark cautionary tale. The Wuoti and Gantt families, two Vermont couples whose foster care licenses were revoked or threatened after they declined to endorse gender ideology, became the center of Wuoti v. Winters. Their case drew support from other current and prospective foster and adoptive parents who described facing the same impossible choice: abandon deeply held convictions or lose the children they had been caring for.

Their stories reflected the broader reality of families willing to open their homes being told their continued service depended on ideological conformity. Vermont ultimately adopted a new policy clarifying that foster families need not abandon their religious beliefs or actively promote gender ideology to qualify as foster parents. The case was dismissedthe following month — a quiet victory with loud implications.

This pattern of ideological exclusion has deep roots. In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, former foster children placed through Catholic Social Services shared with the Supreme Court how faith-grounded homes had rescued and transformed their lives.

The Trump administration accelerated these developments at the federal level. A rule implemented during the Biden administration, requiring prospective foster homes to prove they will support a child’s gender transition or LGBTQ+ status in order to retain federal funding, was formally rescinded in March 2026.

The Administration for Children and Families noted there are only 57 homes for every 100 children who come into the foster care system. You cannot simultaneously face a catastrophic shortage of foster families and systematically exclude those most likely to volunteer — families motivated by religious conviction to serve the vulnerable.

The most reliable pipeline of foster and adoptive parents in the United States has historically been people of faith. They foster not because the government incentivizes it, but because they believe orphans and vulnerable children have a claim on their care that transcends bureaucratic convenience. Gender ideology mandates did not protect foster children. They reduced the number of homes available to receive them.

Foster children are among the most wounded children in our country. They have lost families. Many have been abused. The system that was supposed to protect them has often re-traumatized them. What they need is a stable, loving home where adults are committed to their long-term flourishing.

To tell a child that a loving family is disqualified from caring for them because those adults will not recite a particular set of ideological claims is not compassion. It is cruelty. To classify the refusal to embrace the fiction of gender ideology as a form of abuse by keeping children from safe homes, or baring exemplary families from serving is among the most perverse outcomes a child welfare system could produce.

As National Foster Care Month comes to a close, attention should remain on children still waiting for permanent homes. Courts, states, and now the federal government are beginning to correct course. The children waiting for homes cannot afford for this correction to come any slower.

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project. She has filed amicus briefs on behalf of multiple families in court cases fighting attacks on foster care programs.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.