Over 20,000 kids age out of the foster care system each year.
You can’t use foster care numbers as an example. Less than a third of the children in foster care are eligible for adoption. And if the child enters foster care as a teen, he/she may never make it into the “pool” of eligible adoptees. I know one family that took in a 16 year old as a foster and then adopted her after she turned 18 since that was the only way the system would work. They would have loved to adopt her younger but the system just doesn’t work that way.
Of the 400,000 kids in foster care at any given time, roughly 100,000 of them have had parental rights terminated and are legally free for adoption.
Maybe. But if the child is religious it might amount to emotional torture. Imagine being a teen, brought up in a Catholic or Christian family with a good sense of right and wrong, being orphaned and forced to live with a homosexual couple under threat of not being adopted otherwise.
An older child placed for adoption has a voice and can state their wish not to be adopted by any number of people for whatever reasons.Maybe. But if the child is religious it might amount to emotional torture. Imagine being a teen, brought up in a Catholic or Christian family with a good sense of right and wrong, being orphaned and forced to live with a homosexual couple under threat of not being adopted otherwise.
The point (again) is that placing a child with two men or two women might be preferable to the status quo (living in an orphanage) in extreme cases. But in* most *cases, the very strong preference should be to find the child a family with a mother and a father. In no case should a placement in a deviant household be forced on anyone - not the child, not the agency and not the birth parents.
I disagree. You’re assuming that the child will turn into an unrepentant sinner. Not only do you not know what will happen, neither you nor I nor the Pope himself knows who will make it into Heaven and who won’t.
That would be bad, but adoption agencies don’t force children to live with people they don’t want to live with. There’s a whole big process of matching children with parents.
Exactly. An older child can say they don’t want to be adopted. If a parent or parents aren’t a good match for a child (as would be the case for a child not wanting to live with a gay couple) then the adoption would not proceed. If a child did not want Catholic parents that is also within the child’s right to voice that concern. Older kids are given a court appointed advocate that fights for that particular child and what is best for that child alone. And I’m sure everyone has heard of cases that an adoptive child is returned to an agency due to acting out of control. If an adoption did go through and it made the child that uncomfortable then that is a very likely outcome. I don’t see how we can really morally say that children are better off in a bad situation than be placed into another situation that may or may not work out until we are willing and able to provide an alternative that really is a blessing to these kids. In a world where children were truly cherished and life was viewed as a blessing, these discussions would not ever take place.
Can you say it is fair to assume that the child will be taught that it is moral for two women or two men to live with each other in imitation of a marital relationship, including the presumption that it is offensive to believe that homosexual and heterosexual relationships are not on an exactly equivalent footing in meaning and dignity in every way? If that is not what homosexual couples are going to teach their children, what do you believe they will teach?
Yes, it’s fair to assume that.
Fair enough, but it concerns me that it is this particular area of moral wrong-headedness that seems to be no problem. When I ask people to come up with other areas of moral law that should not raise a concern in selecting a placement, I don’t hear many other exceptions being made. Why is that? Besides, now society is going from…“well, OK, not ideal of course, but an exception could be made” to “it is unfair to discriminate at all against same-sex couple because it isn’t fair to say that homosexual actong out is immoral in the first place.”
This provides me the opportune time to ask which is more moral? Abortion or SS couple adoption? Without assuming, I have a sense I might know mommy k’s answer reading thru this thread. But I’m curious as to what all the Catholics here, who are so strongly opposed to SS couples adopting children, have to say if given the 2 choices? I pray no one here believes abortion would be better rather than allowing a SS couple to provide life. For me I know as a non practicing Catholic it’s a no brainer and know exactly where I stand. And it is with the SS couple adopting and providing life for the child.
I’m no expert, but i think you’ll get an answer along the lines of ‘you can’t do evil in the interest of doing good.’
Should Joseph’s brothers have actually killed him or sold him to traders headed for Egypt? Did Judah do well to convince his brothers to sell Joseph, rather than killing him? Yes, we run into these moral conundrums all of the time. The caution is to realize that God’s ability to use Joseph’s fate to a good end does not make the choice to sell your brother to the nearest caravan into one of the better options.
Please excuse my confusion. So are you saying choosing to give the child life and dare I say a family via SS cpl adoption (although I know imperfect as that may be in Catholic thought) is not a better option than abortion?
I’m no expert, but my guess is that the answer will be along the lines that both lead to death, one to temporal death and one to eternal death.
True. From what I know, the contemporary equivalent of an orphanage is a group home, which generally is a euphemism for kids who have problems that can’t be handled by foster parents in private residence. These would be the foster children with worse than average psychological problems, intellectual disabilities, substance abuse problems, delinquency problems, etc.
I’m no expert either. But I do know it’s way above my pedigree to determine who does and does not gain eternal life in the end.