The Oregon Department of Human Services decided that Jessica Bates, a single woman, could not foster or adopt because she refused to promise to put her religious beliefs — or knowledge of basic biology — aside. The Alliance Defending Freedom helped her go to court — suit filed in April 2023 — and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled against the state’s gender-identity brainwashing mandate.

The court ruled that the rejection of Bates’s application probably violated the First Amendment. “Adoption is not a constitutional law dead zone. And a state’s general conception of the child’s best interest does not create a force field against the valid operation of other constitutional rights.”

It’s maddening that some people who are ready and willing to foster and adopt are rejected for ideological reasons. It’s even more infuriating that these rejections are almost always based on theoretical scenarios — because sometimes the values of the sexual revolution mean more to child-welfare bureaucracies than do the children themselves or the work of placing them in permanent, loving homes.

More from ADF here.