The interests of children must come before Catholic dogma

By Keith Porteous Wood

It is welcome news that the Charity Commission will not permit the adoption agency Catholic Care (Diocese of Leeds) to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. The Charity, which is largely publicly funded, was in effect saying: “we would prefer that children do not to have any adoptive parents if the alternative is gay ones”. You can read the details of the decision here.

The Charity has gone to enormous lengths in this fight while other rebel charities have “seen the light” and either become secularised or, if they were unwilling to cut their ties to the Catholic Church, closed down.

Catholic Care was determined to stop at nothing to avoid conforming to what Parliament intended when it enacted the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007, and what the case law on Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires, particularly given the essentially public nature of the adoption services. Most of the expenditure of these adoption agencies came from public funds, generally from local authorities.

The rationale behind the decision was not to give equality to gay adopters, but was made in the interests of children to ensure the largest possible pool of adoptive parents. By failing to do this, the Church has once more shown its obsession with dogma over compassion and over the best interests of the children they serve. Similarly, while the Church has accepted individual homosexuals as adopters, it refuses to do so if they are in partnerships, despite those in partnerships being more likely to be able to provide a stable home life.

The 2007 Regulations gave agencies stay of execution until the end of 2008 to conform to the law. Most Catholic agencies agreed to adopt non-discriminatory practices, indeed we understand some were pleased no longer to be bound by the discriminatory rules imposed on them by the Church.

Catholic Care was the last adoption agency to hold out for the right to discriminate. The Charity Commission refused to be intimidated by the disgraceful blackmail tactic so readily resorted to by churches involved in welfare – that of threatening to withdraw services if they don’t get their own way. The Charity Commission said that there are other agencies in the area who would take up the work, it said. So, closing down Catholic Care would not be the disaster they were trying to make it out to be.

This decision, which creates a precedent in England and Wales, is a victory for the best interests of the children and their human rights in the face of religious demands for special treatment.