EDITORIAL: Michigan Legislators Once Again Target Gays & Lesbians

LEGISLATORS SERVING ON the Michigan House Committee on Families, Children, and Seniors have passed three bills out of committee. House Bills 4188 (LaFontaine-32), 4189 (Santana-9), and 4190 (Leutheuser-58) aim to allow taxpayer funded adoption agencies the ability to deny an adoption placement based on that agency’s moral or religious beliefs.

Michigan has 14,000 children in foster care at any one time. This trio of bills could threaten the placement of the over 3,000 foster care children whose biological parents’ rights have been terminated and who are just waiting for homes. Additionally, the bills protect public funding for agencies choosing to discriminate. This amounts to yet another misguided attempt to target gays and lesbians who live, work, pay taxes and hope to raise their families in Michigan.

We hope that if and when the package were to go to Gov. Snyder he would veto any such legislation. However, just a few months after he was elected in 2010, he stripped gays and lesbians employed by the state of their health insurance solely because of the sexual orientation of the people involved.

These bills are based religious bigotry. The legislators who crafted them and who voted to move the bills out of committee have once again showed the nation that Michigan continues to be mired in embarrassing social regressivism at the expense of children.