In any given year, tragedy, family dysfunction, poverty, neglect, and abuse separate hundreds of thousands of children from their birth parents.

Where adoption cannot be arranged, many of these children find themselves moved from one foster family to another. Finding a permanent home for abused, handicapped, or troubled children is especially hard. In such cases, objections are rarely raised when prospective adoptive parents happen to be gays or lesbians. Whatever one’s views about the morality of homosexuality, it is hard to understand how an orphaned or abandoned child does not benefit from being placed in a loving home.

Unfortunately, the official policy of the Catholic Church now appears to be that such adoptions cannot benefit children and are in every instance gravely immoral. This exceptionless stance has forced Catholic Charities of Boston to announce that it will stop providing adoption services altogether rather than comply with the state’s antidiscrimination laws.

According to Massachusetts law, Catholic Charities cannot discriminate against adoptive parents on the basis of sexual orientation. Historically, the agency has in fact placed a small number of children-13 out of 720 adoptions over the last twenty years-with gay couples. After this practice was made public, the state’s four bishops decided, evidently under pressure from Rome, that such placements were impermissible. Efforts by the bishops to get the state legislature to enact a “conscience clause” exempting the church from the antidiscrimination law proved futile.

Both the bishops and the Massachusetts legislature are wrong. In some circumstances allowing a loving and responsible gay couple to adopt is almost certainly the best choice Catholic Charities could make, certainly better than leaving a child in foster care or an institution. Fr. J. Bryan Hehir, president of Boston Catholic Charities, compared his agency’s compliance with Massachusetts law in the past to the dilemma Catholics face when voting for a politician who is prochoice. If one is not in favor of abortion, there may yet be sufficient reasons to support a candidate despite his prochoice views. Moreover, Hehir has noted, if complying with the state’s antidiscrimination laws allows Catholic Charities to continue its work, the good achieved far outweighs the bad.

Yet according to the bishops, moral clarity now requires forfeiting all the good the church in Massachusetts can do for adoptive children in the foreseeable future. Another consequence of moral clarity, however, is that the church, which has courageously opposed abortion, now appears to be placing objections to homosexuality before concern for the fate of unwanted or needy children.

But if the bishops have swallowed a camel and strained out a gnat, leaders of the Massachusetts legislature have done little better. Like the right to speech, press, and assembly, the exercise of religion is given special protection by the Constitution. Whether it is conscientious objection to military service or exempting Communion wine from Prohibition laws, the inviolability of religious belief lies at the heart of the Constitution’s understanding of the limits of government coercion. The state must demonstrate a high and compelling interest before it can circumscribe the free exercise of religion. In many contexts, antidiscrimination law constitutes such an interest, especially where a religious institution is taking public money. But that is not the case here.

Same-sex marriage is an unprecedented social experiment and its long-term effects on children are not yet known. Reasonable people disagree about those effects. In that context, granting Catholic Charities a conscience clause would be a prudent effort to protect a religious group’s right to act on its long-held beliefs. Moreover, any harm done to same-sex couples by the church’s policy is likely to be minimal. Catholic Charities is only one of many state-licensed adoption services. If alternatives for same-sex couples readily exist, the justification for restricting the church’s freedom of conscience is that much weaker. As we wrote concerning California’s law requiring Catholic Charities to provide contraception coverage in its employee health-care plan (“Uncharitable Interpretation,” March 26, 2004): “Forcing religious groups that have traditionally provided public welfare and health services to either violate their moral principles or abandon cooperation with the state in charitable work violates the most basic rights of conscience. Religiously distinctive institutions licensed to operate in the public square should not have to act like secular institutions....As the writers of the Bill of Rights knew, religious pluralism needs protection, especially when a religious group’s teachings are unpopular.”

The Massachusetts bishops are gravely misguided in ending the adoption services provided by Catholic Charities. Still, if compelled by antidiscrimination laws to choose between traditional sexual morality and established social-service partnerships with the state, many religious communities will forgo the latter. Cooler heads must prevail. Otherwise, more children will be abandoned.

March 14, 2006