Tag Archives: Social Worker

News

Ontario government seizes foster kids from Christian couple over Santa Claus and Easter bunny

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Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue
Canada Election 2015: Socialists in red, Communists in Orange, Conservatives in blue

In Canada, Christian couples are qualified to pay mandatory taxes to the secular government, but they’re not qualified raise children. That’s the government’s job, apparently.

Check out this story from the Toronto Sun.

Excerpt:

‘Twas a few days before Christmas when all through a Hamilton courtroom of the hallowed Superior Court of Ontario, the lawyers were arguing about – Santa Claus.

And the Easter bunny as well.

To his credit, Justice Andrew Goodman kept a straight face throughout the hearing as the lawyer for the Hamilton CAS struggled to explain why the agency suddenly yanked two little girls from their happy foster home just because their devout Christian foster parents wouldn’t lie and tell them Santa and the Easter Bunny were real.

The children — aged four and three at the time — faced the imminent danger that the “magic” of the holidays might be destroyed if they were left with Derek and Frances Baars, argued lawyer Jim Wood.

“They’re entitled to believe that while they’re sleeping, Santa Claus is coming to put the presents under the tree,” he insisted. “The risk is there. The children needed to be removed.”

The Baars were upfront when they signed on: They don’t celebrate Halloween and, as their glowing SAFE Homestudy Report clearly states, they “do not endorse Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny as they do not wish to lie to children.”

They were approved as foster parents in December 2015 and the sisters moved into their home a week before Christmas.

The Baars bought them gifts and celebrated the holiday — but carefully avoided the Santa question. Their birth mother even sent a note thanking them for giving her girls such a nice Christmas.

[…]Their CAS worker was hopping mad by their hearsay, told them it was an essential part of Canadian culture and issued an ultimatum: Tell the girls the Easter Bunny was real or their foster home would be closed.

And so it was. They were abruptly fired as foster parents and the mystified little girls were pulled from their home the next day.

It was an emergency! The children needed to be removed from the home right away by the benevolent taxpayer-funded social workers.

More:

Despite the dire shortage of foster parents in the region, the Baars were no longer acceptable to the Hamilton CAS. They’d even offered to care only for infants or kids for whom Santa and the Easter Bunny weren’t important, but were turned down.

The children need to be removed, because the parents are obviously dangerous. It’s dangerous to tell children that Santa Claus isn’t real, because it’s better to lie to them, and then have that mistrust poison the relationship between child and parents.

My personal view on this is exactly what the Christian couple decided. Make Christmas and Easter fun days, but focus on the theological issues involved in each day: the Incarnation and the Resurrection. You don’t want to get into a situation where you poison the relationship with your children by lying to them – telling them lies that make them feel good, and then having them find out later from their same-age peers the truth. It undermines you, and elevates their peers as trustworthy truth-tellers.

I just have to point out one more fact about this province of Ontario in Canada, and their views on raising children. Remember that the Deputy Minister of Education in Ontario designed a sex-education curriculum that was mandatory for all the children in Ontario. He was later convicted of child pornography. And Ontario also passed a law allowing the state to seize children from parents who disagree with the province’s LGBT agenda. So clearly, this is not the place to get married and have children, if you expect to raise your children according to a sensible Judeo-Christian worldview.

Maybe voting in a big secular government isn’t such a great thing. I know that when I give money to private sector businesses in free exchanges of value, they would not come to my house looking for children to seize. They just take their money, and I get something useful that I wanted that matches MY values. When you grow government, you end up paying them regardless of how they perform, and then when they are big enough, they turn around and starting pushing you around. You’ll never have that problem when you keep government focused on its Constitutional responsibilities. Unfortunately, the people of Canada have apparently forgotten all about how to organize a government so that it respects liberty.

News

Should the secular left allow Christians to be social workers?

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

This is from religious liberty rock star David French, writing in National Review. He writes about a new Tennessee bill that protects Christian social workers from having to violate their consciences when doing their jobs.

He says:

The Tennessee legislature has passed a bill protecting from liability “counselors and therapists who refuse to counsel a client as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with a sincerely held religious belief of the counselor or therapist.”

[…]Two legal cases I worked on immediately come to mind. The first involved a young woman named Emily Brooker, a social-work student at Missouri State University. Emily’s academic “crime” was refusing a professor’s demand that she sign her name to a letter to the state legislature advocating gay adoption.

Rather than recognizing that teachers can’t compel students to engage in political advocacy, the professor accused her of a “Level 3” grievance (the university’s most serious academic offense). The department then subjected Emily to a Star Chamber–style political inquiry, where a panel of professors demanded to know whether she was a “sinner” and kept her from having a lawyer, an advocate, or even her own mother in the room. The panel convicted her of the offense and required her to change her beliefs as a condition of graduation.

In the second case, I represented Julea Ward against Eastern Michigan University. Julea was in the final stages of her graduate counseling program when she was asked to counsel a gay man about his same-sex relationship. She declined and referred the file to another counselor who had no moral objections. The client was counseled without incident. Indeed, he didn’t even know his file had been referred.

The university, however, found her referral intolerable and subjected Julea to a “formal review,” accusing her of “imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” and of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Once again, a student was summoned to the Star Chamber, and once again public officials probed a private citizen’s religious beliefs. One university official actually held it against her that she “communicated an attempt to maintain [her] belief system.” She was expelled from the program just weeks before graduation.

David French used to work at the Alliance Defending Freedom, but now he works for the American Center for Law and Justice.

I noticed that Casey Mattox at the Alliance Defending Freedom has a warning for Christians who think that the advance of the sexual revolutionaries won’t affect them.

Mattox writes:

While the anti-conscience activists pretend that conscientious objectors are declining goods or services because of sexual orientation, every case disproves that characterization. These creative professionals serve all persons. They object only to facilitating and celebrating a particular event that would require them to advance a message contrary to their religious convictions.

The left had historically mocked suggestions that any pastor would ever be forced to perform a same sex wedding in violation of their faith. But the mask is slipping. See the hysterical response to a Georgia law that would have done little more than protect pastors, churches and other nonprofit religious organizations from hosting and solemnizing a same-sex marriage. Indeed, the left has already attempted to force a pastor to perform a same-sex wedding that would violate his faith. And within hours of the Supreme Court’s decision finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, activists were urging termination of tax exemptions for churches that decline to perform same-sex weddings.

Not every same-sex wedding is a church wedding, but some are. If Christian videographers, wedding coordinators, musicians, and othercreative professionals – let alone pastors themselves – are required to provide their services for same-sex weddings, some will even have to be physically present, even participating in religious worship where they believe the prayers prayed, hymns sung, and scriptures read in support are actually blaspheming their own God.

The opponents of RFRA and like religious freedom protections are still quick to deploy their “separation of church and state” cliché, but one side is demanding that the state fine people for declining to participate in a religious service. It isn’t mine. It’s the ACLU and its allies who are ready to use the power of the state to compel unwilling people to participate in religious services.

[…]Of the same-sex marriage agenda, Erick Erickson has coined the phrase, “You will be made to care.” But in some cases this is insufficient. You must participate. Even if the left must use the power of the government to fine you if you refuse, you will be made to worship their god.

I think a lot of Christians sort of don’t think it’s a problem if they keep their faith in a box and only let it out to see the light of day for purposes of feeling good, or having community. But Christianity isn’t like that. It’s not something for the benefit of the Christian, it’s a worldview. And part of that worldview is not only doing the things that God wants us to do as individual, but also declaring and defending God’s values and character to others, when the subject comes up for discussion. We are not free to promote things that God does not agree with.

Commentary

How schools of social work stifle conservative views in the name of diversity

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Here’s a great story from The Weekly Standard. It’s hard for me to slice it up so I can make the point of the article, but I’ll try, and if you like it, you go read the whole thing.

The author Devorah Goldman says this:

“I can’t have you participate in class anymore.”

I was on my way out of class when my social welfare and policy professor casually called me over to tell me this. The friendliness of her tone did not match her words, and I attempted a shocked, confused apology. It was my first semester at the Hunter College School of Social Work, and I was as yet unfamiliar with the consistent, underlying threat that characterized much of the school’s policy and atmosphere. This professor was simply more open and direct than most.

I asked if I had said or done anything inappropriate or disrespectful, and she was quick to assure me that it was not my behavior that was the problem. No: It was my opinions. Or, as she put it, “I have to give over this information as is.”

I spent the rest of that semester mostly quiet, frustrated, and missing my undergraduate days, when my professors encouraged intellectual diversity and give-and-take. I attempted to take my case to a higher-up at school, an extremely nice, fair professor who insisted that it was in my own best interest not to rock the boat. I was doing well in his class, and I believed him when he told me he wanted me to continue doing well. He explained to me that people who were viewed as too conservative had had problems graduating in the past, and he didn’t want that to happen to me. I thought he was joking .  .  . until I realized he wasn’t.

[…]Two hundred thirty-five master’s programs in the United States are accredited by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), which requires schools to “advocate for human rights and social and economic justice” and to “engage in practices that advance social and economic justice” as part of their curricula. As Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), points out, the CSWE standards act as “an invitation for schools to discriminate against students with dissenting views.”

Lukianoff discovered the abusive culture fostered by CSWE after several students complained about their treatment in social work programs. Emily Brooker, a Christian student at Missouri State University’s School of Social Work in 2006, was asked by her professor to sign a letter to the Missouri legislature in favor of homosexual adoption. When she explained that doing so would violate her religious beliefs and requested a different assignment, she was subjected to a two-and-a-half-hour interrogation by an ethics committee and charged with a “Level Three Grievance” (the most severe kind). Brooker was not permitted to have an advocate or a tape recorder with her at the ethics meeting, during which she was told to sign a contract promising that she would “close the gap” between her religious beliefs and the values of the social work profession. At the risk of having her degree withheld, Brooker acquiesced.

Bill Felkner, a student at Rhode Island College’s School of Social Work, was instructed to lobby the Rhode Island legislature for several policies he did not support. In addition, RIC’s policy internship requirements for graduate students included forcing students to advance policies that would further “progressive social change.” When Felkner accepted an internship in the policy department of Republican Rhode Island governor Don Carcieri’s office, he received a letter from Lenore Olsen, chair of the Social Work Department, informing him that he had violated their requirements and could no longer pursue a master’s degree in social work policy.

[…]And so I sat, zombie-like, through the strange and sad reality that is groupthink for two long years. In a publicly funded school in America’s greatest city, I was censored, threatened, and despised by my teachers. I left school after graduation feeling that something had been stolen from me. I wanted to go back and argue with my teachers some more, ask them, for example, whether a description of Reagan’s economic policies as “nightmarish” in a textbook could be considered unbiased in any context. I wished I had stood up more often for my white male friends in class, asked people if they really believed that Band-Aids that were not exactly fair and not exactly dark in color were racist. Realizing that I had been awarded a diploma in part because I kept my opinions to myself was deeply unsatisfying.

Conservative students need to be aware that they are likely to face discrimination in social work programs on campus, and probably in many other programs as well. They will either have to silence themselves or change their views to be in compliance with secular leftist ideology. What’s even scarier, though, is when students who are raised in traditional evangelical homes go off to college and swallow secular leftist values uncritically. It always shocks me a little when I meet students who were raised in a married home with two evangelical parents and they tell me that they vote for Democrats. I just had a conversation this week with a young woman who claimed to be pro-life and pro-marriage who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. She is studying journalism, and I would bet that there are no conservative professors in her program. She told me that she voted for Obama because of environmentalism and Obamacare. She also expressed preference for big government over small government.

It’s definitely something to be aware of – the lack of critical thinking and respectful dialog in some of these programs. I’m going to be giving her a list of conservative news sites to read, like The Stream, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Signal, and so on. I wonder if she has ever read a conservative economist or journalist before… I’ll find out.

If you insist on going to programs that are more ideology than marketable skills, then expect to have to keep your mouth shut all the way through in order to graduate. And then after you graduate, whenever you get the chance, vote for smaller government, lower taxes, and more academic freedom laws that protect a diversity of views in the classroom. I also recommend donating to legal groups who defend basic liberties, such as Alliance Defending Freedom.