How much should adoption agencies take the religion of families into account? What if a family’s religious beliefs don’t affirm LGBTQ identities?

These questions are central to two religious-liberty lawsuits filed on behalf of Christian families who want to adopt children but were denied by state agencies because their religious faiths don’t support gay marriage or transgender identities.

One case is in Massachusetts. The other is in Oregon. The conflict over religious liberty and LGBTQ rights in adoption is expected to grow, as the issue is joined in other states at a time when all sides are testing the legal and constitutional limits of gender and related matters.

“It’s a burgeoning issue,” an attorney, Benjamin Fleshman, at a religious liberty law firm, Becket, tells the Sun. “There are plenty of other religious groups or religious couples that have similar beliefs, and they would also be barred from getting a license.”

In the first case, a couple from Massachusetts, Mike and Katherine Burke, are suing the state’s Department of Children and Families, alleging their denial of an adoption license is religious discrimination and a violation of their First Amendment rights.

The Burkes filed their lawsuit in federal district court in August against Massachusetts’s secretary of health and human services, Kate Walsh, and several members of the Department of Children and Families.

Mr. Burke is an Iraq War veteran, and his wife is a former paraprofessional for special-needs children. The couple struggled with infertility and turned to fostering with “the hope of caring for and eventually adopting children in need of a stable, loving home,” the lawsuit states.  

The Burkes say they passed with flying colors the agency’s 30 hours of training, lengthy interviews, and home assessments required for an adoption license, except for one sticking point: their Catholic beliefs on gender, sexuality, and marriage.

The complaint states that the Burkes were “troubled” by how much of the questioning at the home assessment centered on their Catholic faith and “around their views on sexuality and their response if a child were, in the future, to struggle with gender dysphoria or to identify as gay or lesbian.”

“DCF denied the Burkes a foster care license, and, as such, their last opportunity to become parents,” the complaint states. “Only one reason was given for that denial: they ‘would not be affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA.’”

“They say specifically that their faith is not affirming and neither are they, and that’s the only reason given for their denial,” Mr. Fleshman, who is on the Becket team representing the Burkes, says. “So the beliefs are tied directly back to their Catholic religion.”

The Burkes are seeking nominal damages and for the black mark on their adoption file to be removed, so they won’t encounter further complication if they decide to pursue adoption elsewhere. They’re also hoping the case will “set a precedent” that the state “shouldn’t be able to deny a license based solely on their religious beliefs.”

In the second case, a widow in Oregon with five children, Jessica Bates, was denied a license to adopt children from foster care because of her Christian beliefs regarding gender, sexuality, and marriage.

Ms. Bates filed a lawsuit against state officials in federal district court in April, arguing that this denial is a violation of the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause. A religious liberty law firm, Alliance Defending Freedom, is representing Ms. Bates in the case.

Ms. Bates lost her husband to a car accident six years ago and felt a calling to adopt a sibling pair from foster care to add to her family. Yet the Oregon Department of Human Services, the agency responsible for the state’s child welfare programs, denied her application because adopting families in the state must agree to “respect, accept, and support … the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of adopted children, and Ms. Bates said she could not do that.

“Under this rule, caregivers must agree to use a child’s preferred pronouns, take a child to affirming events like Pride parades, or sign the child up for dangerous pharmaceutical interventions like puberty blockers and hormone shots — no matter a child’s age,” the lawsuit states. “The state then put Jessica to a choice: abandon your religious convictions or forgo the possibility of ever adopting any child.”

The lawsuit also notes that, like in Massachusetts, the foster system is overwhelmed in Oregon with children needing loving homes.

“Oregon is abandoning children in favor of a political agenda,” a lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom, Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, said in a statement. “Oregon imposes an ideological litmus test that brings Jessica to an impossible choice of renouncing her religious beliefs or abandoning her hope of caring for vulnerable kids.”

A lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Alex Luchenister, who is trying a case of a Jewish family denied adoption by a Christian adoption agency in Tennessee, has a different take.

“Publicly funded foster-care and adoption agencies should not be allowed to discriminate based on religion,” Mr. Luchenister says in a statement to the Sun. Yet, “when a state requires all foster parents to be supportive and affirming of LGBTQ+ children, the parents’ religious beliefs should not be used as a sword that would allow parents to discriminate against and refuse to properly serve such children. These types of rules don’t discriminate against religion because they apply equally to all prospective foster parents.”

As the number of LGBTQ-identifying minors continues to rise, many states are establishing increased protections for these youth. Debates about transgender care for minors are simultaneously being waged in the courts, in the medical community, in politics, and in society at large. Religious families wanting to adopt are caught in the crosshairs. Each side claims to be fighting discrimination, just of different kinds.

“It is becoming a more widespread issue,” Mr. Fleshman says. “If the Burkes win their case and the case in Oregon comes out the right way, then that’ll send a strong signal to any of the other states that are considering policies like this that it’s just not acceptable.”