The Joneses have been model foster parents in a state that’s facing a shortage — but their Christian beliefs are a problem.
When Nick and Audrey Jones began fostering orphaned children in June 2023, they felt called to fill an urgent void facing the Massachusetts foster care system. “We saw the need that there was out there for foster parents,” Nick says. “We wanted to get into action.”
Since then, the couple have taken seven children into their home for short- and long-term placements. Until this spring, they were held in good standing by social workers and enjoyed a positive relationship with the Massachusetts Department for Children and Families. But that changed when they were asked to sign a new foster parent agreement that conflicts with their Christian faith.
The agreement states that foster families are expected to “support, respect, and affirm the foster child’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.” This “LGBTQIA+ Nondiscrimination Policy” requires foster parents to “be respectful of how individuals ask to be identified and use the terms an individual uses to describe themselves.”
Under the new agreement, the DCF is permitted to help foster children change their legal name and gender and access “gender-affirming clothing.” The department will also provide “education and training to all foster families on supporting and affirming a child’s identity” and assess foster families for their “ability and willingness to support and affirm LGBTQIA+ children placed in their care.”
The Joneses could not accept this agreement. They adhere to the biblical view that God created two genders and there is no transitioning between them. During the extensive re-licensing process that foster parents in Massachusetts undergo each year, they expressed this objection to a DCF worker. Although the family only fosters children 6 years old and younger, they were told the policy still applies.
Since then, communication from the DCF has been inconsistent, but the Joneses have been left to assume that their license will be revoked unless they sign the agreement. In turn, their current foster child, an 18-month-old girl who has been in their care since she was 2 months old, will be relocated to a new home.
The social workers Audrey and Nick have dealt with in person have been sympathetic, Audrey explained in an interview with National Review. But the DCF has shown no willingness to be flexible. “They are very cut-and-dry with policy, and if they’re not going to sign this, then that’s that,” she says. “Take the child, we’re done.”
Foster parents Greg and Marianelly Schrock have also refused to sign the agreement on religious grounds. Alongside the Joneses, they are currently suing the DCF in federal court. The couples are represented by the Massachusetts Family Institute and the Alliance Defending Freedom.
The complaint alleges that the DCF has violated the families’ constitutional rights by forcing them to “speak against their core religious beliefs.” It also argues that the agreement does not define what “affirming” a child’s gender identity actually means in practice. Rather than clarifying this point, the “DCF and its employees have chosen to interpret the relevant regulation in a way that specifically disqualifies many Christian and other religious foster parents.”
This fact pattern isn’t unique to Massachusetts. In Vermont, a lawsuit has been filed against the state’s DCF by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Brian and Kaitlyn Wuoti and Michael and Rebecca Gantt. Both families enjoyed praise from social workers and cared for children with complex medical needs. But their foster care licenses were revoked when they refused to agree to the DCF’s “gender-affirming” policies.
Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, the Joneses’ attorney, describes these exclusions as counterproductive. “[In] states across the country,” he says, “even though there’s a desperate need for families like this, they’re still arbitrarily excluding them because of their religious beliefs.”
As the Joneses’ legal complaint notes, Massachusetts is currently facing a severe deficiency of foster parents. The state has only 5,500 foster homes to support between 8,000 and 9,000 children in need of foster care. This shortage has forced social workers to watch children in rented rooms and apartments when they cannot be assigned to families, which risks deepening their trauma. Within the foster homes that are available, foster children are at a high risk of abuse and neglect.
A similar crisis is unfolding in Vermont, where the number of children who need homes also greatly outweighs the number of available foster families. Consequently, some children in the state have been forced to find temporary shelter in police departments and emergency rooms.
The Joneses and Schrocks aren’t the only religious foster parents in Massachusetts. Nick and Audrey are concerned that other families could lose their licenses, but they also worry that the DCF’s policies will discourage new parents from fostering children at a time when the state urgently needs more homes.
“They don’t seem to really be focused on the child if they’re willing to just take them from their home [when] for the rest of the time they’ve been with that family there’s been no issue,” Audrey says. “They’ve been qualified parents up until a point now where they’re saying based on your religion, now you’re no longer qualified. . . . It’s the children that are being affected the most.”
Audrey tells me that though she has “spent many hours crying” over potentially losing her daughter, she and Nick have striven to shield the child from their distress. She stresses that “reunification” between the child and her biological family is her ultimate goal. “But,” Nick adds, “we would hope we’re able to keep her until that time, or if it ever does switch to adoption, we would adopt her in a heartbeat.”
As their legal case unfolds, the Joneses can only remain hopeful for their own family and the other foster families in Massachusetts that might be fractured by the DCF’s new policies. “We are in prayer over this,” Audrey tells me. “Ultimately, God is in control. And so whatever his will is will be done.”