The sexual revolution has always had a bill to send someone else. The question is who ends up paying it.
For the last decade, that bill has landed in the mailboxes of ordinary Americans who simply wanted to run their businesses consistent with their faith. Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker, spent the better part of a decade fighting the state after he declined to design a custom cake celebrating a same-sex wedding.
Barronelle Stutzman, the 77-year-old florist who owned Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington, served a gay couple happily for nearly a decade — birthday flowers, get-well-soon arrangements — but could not in good conscience create the floral arrangements for their same-sex wedding. She was sued by both the couple and the state attorney general.
Blaine Adamson, a Kentucky print shop owner, was hauled before the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission after he declined to print T-shirts promoting a pride festival. These were not hard-hearted people. They were people of faith trying to live consistently with their convictions, and the state came for them anyway.
The pattern has not stopped at business owners. It has followed the sexual revolution’s logic into places far more intimate — and far more consequential.
Mary and Jeremy Cox, devout Catholics from Indiana, refused to use their teenage child’s preferred pronouns based on their sincerely held religious beliefs. The Indiana Department of Child Services removed the child from their home. Though DCS later admitted the parents were not abusive, the child was never returned. The Coxes appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, arguing the case raised a question of nationwide importance: When can the government remove a child from admittedly fit parents for holding the wrong beliefs? In March 2024, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving the lower court ruling intact.
The reach of this ideology into foster care has been no less aggressive. In Oregon, a widowed mother of five named Jessica Bates applied to adopt two young siblings from the state’s foster care system. Oregon’s rules required applicants to agree to “accept” and “support” a child’s gender identity — meaning, in practice, that parents must use a child’s preferred pronouns, refrain from restricting clothing choices, and facilitate access to pharmaceutical gender interventions. Bates said she would love and care for any child placed with her, but she could not in good conscience affirm an identity contrary to her Christian beliefs about human sexuality.
Oregon said that wasn’t good enough and denied her application. She sued, and after years of litigation, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in July 2025 striking down the Oregon policy, finding it violated the First Amendment. That’s a victory — but the fact that a widowed Christian mother had to fight the federal appellate courts for the right to adopt is itself an indictment.
Oregon is not alone. Similar policies have been enacted in Washington, Vermont, and Massachusetts, requiring foster and adoptive parents to actively affirm a child’s gender identity as a condition of participation in the child welfare system.
Fortunately, the tide is beginning to turn — Washington settled a lawsuit in May 2026 under a permanent federal injunction blocking the state from forcing foster parents to use preferred pronouns or affirm gender ideology that conflicts with their faith. Vermont settled two similar cases in February 2026 and dropped its requirement that applicants disclose personal beliefs about LGBTQ+ issues, and Massachusetts removed its gender-affirmation mandate from licensing rules in December 2025.
These are real victories, but each required years of costly litigation by families willing to fight. The practical effect of such policies is a religious test for foster parenting — one that systematically excludes the very people most likely to open their homes.
Here in North Carolina, agency guidance has raised legitimate questions about whether North Carolina could use similar standards to screen out foster families based on their beliefs about gender. The state has no specific law on this, but guidelines from the NC Division of Social Services direct case workers to assess whether a child is at risk from parents who refuse to affirm gender identity. A failure to affirm can be treated as a basis for denying a license.
There are too many examples of welfare bureaucracies being weaponized against families to say, “That will never happen here.” All it takes is a single caseworker who believes its abusive not to “affirm” a child’s transition. Should that happen, good families would be removed from the foster care system.
Barna Research found that Christians are twice as likely to foster or adopt compared to non-Christians, and are more willing to care for older children, sibling groups, and children with special needs. The faith that leads someone to believe boys cannot become girls is the same faith that leads them to open their home to a stranger’s child. You cannot surgically remove one conviction without losing the other. When states disqualify good families through an ideological litmus test, children lose real families — families who were prepared to love and serve them.
Legislation to protect North Carolina foster parents from ideological litmus tests would not be a statement about transgender politics. It is a statement about what foster care is for. Foster care exists to find homes for vulnerable children — not to enforce doctrinal conformity among the adults who are willing to provide those homes. The moment we allow ideological gatekeeping to narrow the pool of eligible families, children pay the price.
An ounce of prevention, Benjamin Franklin wisely noted, is worth a pound of cure. We have the opportunity to prevent what California, Washington, and Oregon have already inflicted. Let’s take it.