Emboldened By Trump, Georgia GOP Pushes Anti-LGBTQ Adoption Bill

Georgia is on its way to creating a law that would allow state-funded adoption agencies to turn away LGBTQ couples ― or, more specifically, to turn away any parents the agencies don’t approve of based on religious beliefs.

Make no mistake: This anti-LGBTQ adoption bill is part of a wide-reaching plan by religious conservatives ― backed by President Donald Trump and his administration ― to turn same-sex marriage into second-class marriage with a longer-term goal of overturning federal marriage rights for gays and lesbians entirely.

How are religious conservatives turning same-sex marriage into second-class marriage? By getting courts to rule that wedding-related businesses can turn away gay couples based on the business owners’ religious beliefs, by allowing governments to refuse to give the same benefits to spouses within same-sex marriages as they do to those within opposite-sex marriages, and by allowing adoption agencies to say no to LGBTQ parents.

I’ve written before about their strategic plans. They date back to at least 2014 ― before the 2015 Obergefell marriage equality ruling ― when anti-LGBQ conservatives mapped out what they would do if they lost at the high court (which they did). I sat in on a panel at the Family Research Council’s 2014 Values Voter Summit, during which Frank Schubert (the mastermind behind California’s infamous Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in 2008), the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown and others articulated a two-pronged strategy.

Source: huffingtonpost