Seven states allow adoption agencies to deny kids forever homes and reject qualified parents—simply because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). So the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) decided it was time to push back against these license to discriminate laws.
But the message is one that Fox News doesn’t want its viewers to hear. Why? MAP’s newest ad "Kids Pay the Price," powerfully depicts the kinds of harms children can face when adoption agencies and workers are exempted from following key child welfare laws based on individual beliefs.
Laws like these mean an agency or worker can keep a child in a government group home or foster care rather than place them with loving, qualified LGBT adoptive parents—or even insist on “conversion therapy.”
MAP’s ad, which Fox News Channel refused to air, features Christine James-Brown, president and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), and was released in partnership with CWLA and the National Association of Social Workers (NASW).
Fox News rejected the ad and refused to run it during Tucker Carlson’s show, calling the ad “too powerful.”
It is powerful. Powerfully convincing.
But Fox News Channel’s refusal to air the ad suggests that the consequences kids may experience as a result of these laws are so negative that it’s better to not talk about them.
But MAP is talking, and engaging people in this critical conversation. MAP also published a companion report, Kids Pay the Price: How Religious Exemptions for Child Welfare Agencies Harm Children, in partnership with CWLA and NASW, detailing the potential harms to kids of laws like these. The ad and report coincide with an ACLU lawsuit challenging Michigan’s practice of allowing state-funded child-placing agencies to turn away prospective families headed by same-sex couples based on religious objections.
Rather than ask their audiences to grapple with how harmful and troubling these laws really are, Fox News wants to sweep these issues under the rug—putting kids in harm’s way. Kids deserve better.