Remember when the Biden administration decided that the best way to help orphaned children was to shut down the Christian agencies that were actually placing them in loving homes? Yeah, that happened. HHS Secretary RFK Jr. just reversed that insane Biden-era rule, and Christian foster care agencies across the country can finally do what they’ve been doing for decades — finding kids homes — without the federal government ordering them to abandon their faith first.
What a concept! You mean religious people can help orphans without a government bureaucrat quizzing them on their theology? Somebody alert the ACLU. They’re going to need a group therapy session.
Here’s what Biden’s crew pulled off. They slipped in a rule that basically told faith-based foster care agencies: “You can keep your federal funding, but only if you agree to place children in homes that violate everything you believe.” If a Catholic charity said, “We follow Catholic teaching on marriage and family,” the government said, “Cool, then you’re out.” Didn’t matter that these agencies had been placing kids in stable, loving homes for generations. Didn’t matter that there are 400,000 kids in the foster care system right now who desperately need families. The Biden administration looked at that number and thought, “You know what would really help? Fewer agencies.”
Brilliant strategy. Take a system that’s already overwhelmed and start kicking out the people who are actually doing the work.
The Left’s logic on this was truly something special. They claimed it was about “nondiscrimination.” But the actual discrimination was the government telling Christians they had to choose between their faith and helping orphans. That’s not a choice — that’s a hostage situation. “Renounce your beliefs or we cut off your funding and those kids lose a placement agency.” Real compassionate stuff.
And we’re not talking about fringe beliefs here. We’re talking about what virtually every major religion and every civilization on the planet believed for roughly 5,000 years. But the Biden administration decided that 5,000 years of human history was basically bigotry, and a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington knew better than the Church, the synagogue, and the mosque combined.
(Humble bunch, weren’t they?)
RFK Jr. didn’t just reverse the rule — he made a point of calling it what it was. Religious discrimination, plain and simple. The announcement specifically noted that faith-based agencies serve a massive share of foster placements nationwide and that gutting them doesn’t help a single child. It just punishes people for believing things Democrats don’t like.
Now here’s the part that should make every American furious. While Biden was busy playing theology police with foster care agencies, the actual foster care crisis got worse. More kids in the system. Fewer placements. Longer waits. Kids aging out at 18 with no family, no support, and no one who showed up for them. But at least the government made sure that Catholic Charities couldn’t use federal dollars while holding Catholic beliefs, right? Mission accomplished.
The Democrats have this incredible talent for solving problems that don’t exist while making the real ones worse. Nobody was being harmed by Christian agencies placing kids in Christian homes. The kids were getting families. The families were getting kids. Everyone was winning. But the Left looked at that arrangement and said, “We need to stop this immediately because it offends our ideology.”
Orphans as collateral damage in a culture war. Classy.
This reversal is a clean win. Christian foster agencies are back in business with federal support. Kids in the system just got more options, not fewer. And the bureaucrats who thought they could use orphans as leverage against people of faith just got told to pound sand by a Kennedy, of all people.
Welcome to the timeline where RFK Jr. is defending religious liberty and the Democrats are the ones who tried to punish people for going to church. If you told us that five years ago, we’d have checked you for a fever.
But here we are. And honestly? We’ll take the win.