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December 22, 2025By Daniel Payne | Catholic News Agency
with reports from Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
(CNA) – Massachusetts has omitted language that required prospective foster parents to affirm gender ideology in order to qualify for fostering children.
The change was announced last week in the wake of a federal lawsuit that supported foster parents’ religious liberty and freedom of speech, an executive order from President Donald Trump and concerns expressed by a federal agency.
The suit filed on Sept. 3 in the United States District Court describes the plaintiffs as two Christian couples, one living in Worcester County, one in Middlesex County, who fostered numerous children. Then a change in state requirements, which conflicted with their religious beliefs, interfered with this.
Defendants listed in the suit were officials from the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, and the Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services.
“DCF’s decision to pull licenses from Christian families comes in the midst of a foster-care crisis in Massachusetts,” the suit said. “More than 6,500 children are in the Massachusetts foster-care system, but the state only has 5,100 licensed foster homes. ...
“Facing this crisis, DCF has decided to substantially narrow the pool of eligible foster parents by excluding everyone who will not promise to support and affirm a child’s sexual orientation and gender identity. ...
“From 2009 to 2023, DCF did not require foster families to make promises that they would verbally promote the Department’s views on issues of gender or sexuality,” the suit said.
“That changed sometime around 2023 to 2024, when DCF began requiring foster families” to sign an agreement, promising to “‘[s]upport, respect, and affirm the foster child’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.’”
Families who decline to sign this agreement cannot receive a foster-care license, and previously licensed families will have and have had their license revoked or discontinued, the suit maintained.
Last week Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the legal organizations that filed the suit, said DCF “will no longer exclude Christian and other religious families from foster care” because of their “commonly held beliefs that boys are boys and girls are girls.”
That announcement was in response to DCF’s “emergency regulation” which replaces the words “sexual orientation and gender identity” with “individual identity and needs.”
Explaining the change, DCF said its federal regulator, the Administration for Children and Families, recently expressed the view that the requirement violated the constitutional rights of persons applying to be foster parents.
“DCF is promulgating this amendment on an emergency basis in order to preempt any potential escalation by ACF,” the explanation said. This was to address ACF’s concerns, while continuing to meet the need for foster homes “that support the identity and needs of the children.”
Attorney Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, of Alliance Defending Freedom, said Dec. 17 that families previously excluded by the Massachusetts rule are “eager to reapply for their licenses.”
The lawyer commended Massachusetts for taking a “step in the right direction,” though he said the legal group will continue its efforts until it is “positive that Massachusetts is committed to respecting religious persons and ideological diversity among foster parents.”
“[N]o foster family should ever be forced to choose between remaining faithful to their convictions and answering the call to care for children in need,” the Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center, which also represented the plaintiffs, said when announcing the DCF regulation change Dec. 17. “And no child should lose a safe, loving home because the state targets religious belief.”