butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:
Some extra details from the article:
In a budget bill, a funding committee has introduced a clause which states that federal government cannot end contracts with foster care and adoption agencies just because they discriminate, and yearly funding will be cut by a full 15% to any state which penalizes foster care and adoption agencies for discriminating.
Now. The article doesn’t go into exactly how this is going to have the kind of negative impact they’re predicting, so I’m going to, just so you understand that the first part of that clause is somehow actually the less horrifying one.
There are waaaaaaay too many kids in the foster care system (that’s where 90% of the kids waiting to be adopted are), way more than state level child protective services can handle. This is in part because of funding (it can be very expensive to keep a CPS department fully staffed). So they contract out to private agencies, usually non profits, to place kids with higher levels of need. You’re not going to hear me arguing that these agencies are perfect but a lot of them, seriously a lot, are REALLY GOOD. They’re often charities, they often specialize in various intensive mental health care and provide strict rules, guidelines, and training to any families and staff on board, a lot of these agencies do really fucking good work. And these agencies are critical. They’re almost universally taking in exactly the children that are so hard to place anywhere else (including adoptive homes) and they make sure those kids are safe, that they have free access to quality mental health treatment, that they are prepared to age out if that’s what’s going to happen. And most of the people who work at these programs take really low wages because these are charities and their funding is even more restrictive than the state, but they’re doing this because there are children in the system who need them, because there are a lot of bad things that can and do happen in the system and all they can do is keep protecting kids and keep fighting to prevent those things.
Now lets talk about the not so good agencies. The ones who may or may not be non-profits. The ones that are usually run on socially conservative values of family and discipline despite mountains of evidence and research showing how that directly leads to the kinds of bad things that can and do happen to kids in foster care. The kind that run overcrowded homes and discriminate. Where there is one emotional abuse against a child, there is ALWAYS more. And any of these agencies which gets penalized by the state that contracts with them could now argue it was because of the discrimination. And if they argue that successfully, THE ENTIRE STATE’S ALREADY MEAGER FUNDING GETS CUT BY AN ENTIRE 15%.
15% is a lot, folks. 15% is the difference between whether or not any child can be placed in an intensive support agency’s care ever again. A state that gets punished like this sees every single agency and department within it crippled, unable to serve a full additional 15% of the children they currently serve.
Except they can’t opt out of it. Because these are fucking children. Children without homes, children ripped from families for good or for ill, children with trauma with anxiety with high medical involvement with an enormous risk added to their future simply by virtue of having gone through a system that is already desperately overworked and underfunded. So the agencies don’t stop serving any children. Instead they cut pay to staff, they put fewer kids in the level of support they need, they turn a blind eye to smaller infractions by foster parents and staff because the kid says they want to stay and they can’t afford to disrupt the placement. Kids fall through the cracks. Kids run away and the resources to go looking for them aren’t there. Kids get caught up in abusive or cult like relationships with people who show care and affection to them because they’re not getting enough of it.
Don’t get me wrong, my heart is broken that the one fear I spent my entire childhood and adulthood reassuring myself I wouldn’t face – being told that my sexuality, my partners’ my parents’ made me an unfit parent – is at risk of becoming my reality. I’m fucking devastated by that. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to train myself out of the terror created by watching my mother’s friends’ kids ripped away from them because they were lesbians or bi and that made them unsafe to their own truly beloved children. The guilt created by knowing that if I ever spoke up about the abuse in my home it would be blamed on the sexuality my mom and I shared, and not on her actions. But honestly? In the end? This has a much bigger impact than just that grief. This effects far more children then the ones who would have been adopted or fostered by queer parents.
Which is why it’s so important that we make this a priority. This budget hasn’t been approved yet. This isn’t it’s final draft, and there’s still time for this clause to be written out. So please. For all the kids out there waiting for homes. Add this to what I’m sure is your ever growing list of things to write to congress about. Even if we vote everyone out in 2018 and 45 with them in 2020, two years of these kids’ suffering is too long. One year is too long. Anything more than they already go through is too long.
Just for reference: the federal minimum drinking age is enforced by similar budget incentives. Only states will lose just 8% of federal highway funding if they set the age below 21. This measure is just about double that incentive, which is astounding and draconian as these things go.
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