Last month, I blogged about an incident in which Contemporary Family Services, Inc. — an organization that the state of Maryland licensed to screen prospective foster parents — refused to license a couple (the Crudups) because their religious beliefs led them to bar pork from their home. Maryland state authorities are now investigating CFS for religious discrimination; here is CFS’s response to their allegations (some paragraph breaks added):
CFS denies that it discriminated against Ms. Crudup in its decision to deny her certification as a CFS foster parent. It was within the judgment of the home study writer and the home study supervisor that Ms. Crudup would not be a suitable parent for CFS.
As stated in the letter subsequent to the home study, there were concerns about Ms. Crudups ability to provide the needed flexibility in dealing with the level of youth placed in the care of CFS. What is “clear” from the home study and subsequent letters in that Ms. Crudups religion may be the reason that she does not allow pork in her home but her religion was not the reason that she was denied. The homestudy states “there is an indication that a foster child may not benefit from placement in this home and the placement may be problematic as the result of the families’ strong, religiously/culturally-based restrictions. There may be an imbalance between the needs of the family, particularly the families’ explicit prohibition of pork or pork products in their home, and the needs and/or desires of any child placed.” This was a nice way of saying that the views of Ms. Crudup lacked the level of flexibility necessary to work with the high level children in the care of CFS.
This was further explained in my letter to Ms. Crudup when I specifically stated “your explicit prohibition of pork or pork products showed a persistent inflexibility that may be present in other views you may have when working with the abused and neglected youth (who also often have oppositional/defiant behavior and lack of emotional and anger controls) often placed within the care of CFS”. I also wrote “during the interview, where we get the greatest feel for whether a parent will be an effective CFS treatment foster parent, you expressed an explicit and unyielding position. This, in and of itself, raised a red flag with the home study consultant. She requested follow-up information about your position and even with further questioning, you remained unyielding.”
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, your OLM response fails to quote any other parts of the documentation that was submitted to you as well as to Ms. Crudup. Our seeming fault in this is not that we denied Ms. Crudup but that we were specific in explaining the nature of the conversation from which her unyielding position was based, what is “clear” is that had we simply stated that she was overly obstinate, or stubborn, or uncompromising with being specific to the actual conversation, we would have no need for this
Corrective Action Plan.Interestingly, though we did not discriminate against Ms. Crudup, the exact statute that you quote 07.01.03.03 B.(2)(b) actually allows discrimination to protect the rights of the minor child that would be placed in the home. Odd that you did not mention that portion in your OLM response.
Now I agree that parents need to have some flexibility in dealing with their children; and the government, and entities that contract with the government, may require some flexibility from prospective foster parents.
But surely flexibility doesn’t mean that foster parents may not impose any rigid house rules. “The needs … of any child placed” surely don’t include pork; and it is not the duty of foster parents to cater to all of their foster children’s “desires.” Perhaps the unwillingness to accommodate some desires might be a problem — but a desire for pork? Or, more specifically, a desire to eat pork at home (since the children would be free to eat pork outside)? Saying that rejecting a foster parent because the parent’s insistence on a “no pork in the house” rule unduly interferes with “the needs and/or desires of any child placed” — in fact, with “the rights of the minor child” — is not a sound foster parent licensing philosophy; it is a parody of a foster parent licensing philosophy.
Moreover, I think such a decision is hard to explain as anything but religious discrimination. I suspect that most foster families have some pretty rigid rules that interfere with something the child might want to do — and some of the rules are aimed at protecting the foster parents’ interests (no loud music, no glasses without coasters on the nice furniture, no bringing friends home without the foster parents’ permission, no monopolizing of the refrigerator, no flatulence at the dinner table) and not just the child’s development. It’s a pretty strong inference that the rejection of the Crudups because of their desire to enforce a no-pork-in-the-home rule stems from its religious source, rather than from any neutral judgment that the rule really does interfere with a child’s “needs and/or desires” more than normal parenting rules do.
Note: As I said in my original post, if CFS had officially announced its policies up front, and left the parents free to go through other licensing services — of which there seem to be many — I wouldn’t have as much concern, even though CFS is a government contractor that certifies people for government-required licenses. The ACLU might well disagree, but I think that here having a diversity of options is more valuable than insisting that all the options be nondiscriminatory; if, for instance, some service only wants to certify lesbian couples, another only married couples, and another only Christian families, I think that’s fine. But here it looks like the couple invested a good deal of time in reliance on the service’s applying reasonable criteria, and are now right to claim that they have been rejected on an unreasonable (here, likely religiously discriminatory) basis.