Tag: foster care

Massachusetts parents lose foster license after refusing to sign gender affirming policy for kids

A devout Christian couple has been stripped of their foster license after refusing to sign a gender-affirming policy they say conflicts with their faith.

Lydia and Heath Marvin, from Woburn, Massachusetts, have looked after eight children under the age of four since 2020, including many infants and toddlers with serious medical needs.

But the couple say social workers pulled their license because they refused to sign a clause requiring foster parents to ‘support, respect, and affirm a foster child’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.’

It put them in a position where they were essentially forced them to choose between their religion and the vulnerable children they had dedicated their lives to helping.

‘We were told you must sign the form as is or you will be delicensed,’ Lydia told WBZ. ‘We will absolutely love and support and care for any child in our home, but we simply can’t agree to go against our Christian faith in this area. 

‘Our Christian faith, it really drives us toward that,’ husband Heath explained. ‘[The Book of James] says that true, undefiled religion is to care for the fatherless.’

The Marvins say they were blindsided by the decision. Their last foster child, a baby with complex medical needs, lived with them for 15 months. 

‘Every night for 15 months, we were up at least three times,’ Lydia said. ‘We certainly thought we would have young children in our home for… we didn’t know how long, but we were not done.’

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Gender ideology mandate in foster care opposed by religious liberty, gay rights, pro-drag groups

Vermont’s refusal to place foster children in families with religious objections to gender ideology compels parents to parrot the government’s preferred messages, establishes the Green Mountain State’s own religion and treats “comparable secular activity” more favorably, while the judge who upheld the gender-affirming mandate relied on dubious research.

Those are a handful of arguments in friend-of-the-court briefs as the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals evaluates whether Vermont violated the First Amendment by stripping foster-care licenses from Christian couples Brian and Katy Wuoti and Michael and Rebecca Gantt.

Social workers gave the couples glowing reviews, but Vermont deemed them “unqualified” to parent “any child (even a relative) of any age (even an infant) and for any length of time (even a few hours)” due to their religious beliefs, harming children who need “loving homes,” the couples’ lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom said.

No federal appeals court has yet determined “whether a state may categorically exclude families from foster care because of their protected speech and religious beliefs,” though the 9th Circuit will “likely” rule on the issue “soon,” ADF’s opening brief says.

The San Francisco-based appeals court heard oral argument nearly a year ago, but has yet to rule, in another ADF case by Oregon widow and mother-of-five Jessica Bates, who is suing the Beaver State to let her adopt foster siblings without requiring her to use their preferred pronouns and even give them “hormone shots” if they desire.

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Florida Is Giving Foster Children Powerful Psychotropic Drugs Without Proper Records, Audit Finds 

An audit conducted this summer revealed that children in Florida’s foster care system are being prescribed powerful psychotropic medications at alarmingly high rates. In many cases, state child welfare officials are failing to properly document prescriptions, resulting in children taking powerful medications with scant medical records available to justify them.

Over 2,200 children that are currently in Florida’s foster care system—around one in 10—are prescribed psychotropic medications, reported the Tampa Bay Times. For foster children over the age of 13, more than one in three are on this kind of medication, which includes treatments for conditions like ADHD, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.

According to state rules, “the physician or psychiatric nurse recommending the psychotropic medication is required to complete and sign a medical report,” and each prescription “is required to be documented on a medication log. The case manager must obtain the medication logs at each home visit and include the medication logs in the child’s case file” with the Florida Safe Families Network (FSFN), the state’s child welfare agency.

Yet a state audit released in July found “no records of the psychotropic medications prescribed in the case file in the state’s primary case management system,” according to the Tampa Bay Times. “Logs that record the frequency and dosage of psychotropic medication were missing from 66% of case files reviewed, and authorization records were not found in more than one-third of the case files.”

Even more troubling, the audit found that the state welfare agency did not document prescriptions in 57 out of the 60 cases of children prescribed opioid medication that were reviewed. 

“These documentation deficiencies occurred because the State agency did not have adequate controls to ensure the [child protective investigators] and case managers maintained the children’s case files in FSFN in accordance with State requirements,” the audit reads. “Without adequate controls in place, the State agency could not ensure that children in foster care received the necessary monitoring and care. As a result, the children’s quality of care and health and safety may have been at risk.”

This lack of documentation has had severe effects on many children in Florida’s foster care system. Without proper documentation, children can end up taking unnecessary medications or not getting the prescriptions they actually need.

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States That Legalized Medical Marijuana Saw Nearly 20 Percent Drop In Foster Care Cases For Parental Drug Misuse, Study Finds

States that legalized medical marijuana saw a nearly 20 percent drop in the number of children entering foster care due to parental drug misuse after three years of the reform, a new study found. Legalizing for adult use, meanwhile, was not associated with any statistically significant change in foster care entries.

Researchers at Georgia College and State University set out to learn whether legalization would “lessen stigma, permit proper use, and reduce the chance that a child will be removed” or, conversely, if foster care cases would increase due to expanded access to legal cannabis.

The study looked at national data involving 3.4 million foster care cases from 2007 to 2019. Using difference-in-differences analyses, researchers examined rate changes in foster case placements related to drug misuse, comparing states that enacted legalization to those that maintained prohibition. They controlled for factors such as state unemployment rate and per capita income.

“Our estimates suggest that when states permitted recreational marijuana use, there was no corresponding change in the number of foster care entries related to parental or teenage drug abuse relative to control states,” the study says.

But for states that legalize medical cannabis, there was a discernible shift. In the first two years of implementation, states saw an average eight percent to 10 percent decrease in foster care cases connected to drug misuse. By the third year, cases dropped 18 percent, which amounted to “approximately 700 fewer entries to foster care [that] were related to parental drug abuse when a state legalized medical marijuana.”

That’s an especially important finding given that 90 percent of foster case entries due to drug misuse happen in states where medical cannabis is legal, says the study, which is pending peer review. Drug misuse is the second most common reason that a child is placed into foster care.

The study also compared states that have restrictive versus comprehensive medical cannabis programs, but researchers said they are “hesitant to draw conclusions” about the differences because of conflicting data using two analytic models.

For limited medical marijuana states, there was a “sizable decrease” in foster care drug misuse cases in the third and fourth year after implementation based on one difference-in-difference model, but that effect was less pronounced in the other model.

States with less restrictive medical cannabis legalization laws, in contrast, showed a “statistically and economically significant decrease in the number of entries” in one model, but data from the other model was less clear.

“Our findings suggest that states which legalized medical marijuana experienced a decrease in parental drug abuse-related entries into foster care in the initial years following the legalization compared to states that did not legalize medical marijuana,” the study says. “Estimates exploiting variation in state-level limitations on medical marijuana are mixed.”

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Missouri Foster Parents May Now Legally Possess And Grow Marijuana In Their Homes Under New Emergency Rule

Foster parents in Missouri can now legally possess and grow marijuana in their homes under an emergency rule filed last week by the state Department of Social Services. Consuming cannabis in a manner that emits smoke or vapor, however, is still not allowed inside the house.

Missouri voters in November 2022 passed a ballot initiative, Amendment 3, to legalize and regulate marijuana for adults 21 and older, allowing the purchase and possession of up to three ounces of cannabis and, after registering, the growth of up to six mature plants for personal use. But until Monday, the foster parents of roughly 14,000 children in the state were prohibited from exercising those rights.

The changes to the state rule addressing “physical and environmental standards” for foster care in Missouri were adopted on an emergency basis because the existing policy was in conflict with the voter-approved constitutional amendment, according to a statement attached to the rule’s text.

“Rule 13 CSR 35-60.040 presently provides that foster parents shall not use or possess marijuana or marijuana-infused products,” it says. “A regulation that conflicts with the Missouri Constitution is invalid.”

As an emergency rule, the change is set to expire February 23 of next year.

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Drug Legalization Leads to Significant Reduction in Foster System Admissions

Richard Nixon, in his effort to silence black people and antiwar activists, brought the War on Drugs into full force in 1973. He then signed Reorganization Plan No. 2, which established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Over the course of five decades, this senseless war has waged on. At a cost of over $1 trillion — ruining and ending countless lives in the process — America’s drug war has created a drug problem that is worse now than ever before.

This is no coincidence.

For years, those of us who’ve been paying attention have seen who profits from this inhumane war — the police state and cartels. Since the 1980s and 90s, there has been a long-standing theory of the CIA’s connection to the crack epidemic.

If the CIA trafficking cocaine into the United States sounds like some tin foil conspiracy theory, think again. Their role in the drug trade was exposed in 1996 in a critical investigative series “Dark Alliance” by Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News. The investigation, headed up by Webb revealed ties between the CIA, Nicaraguan contras and the crack cocaine trade ravaging African-American communities.

The investigation provoked massive protests and congressional hearings, as well as overt backlash from the mainstream media to discredit Webb’s reporting. However, decades later, officials would come forward to back up Webb’s original investigation.

Then-senator John Kerry even released a detailed report claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons — but that the U.S. government knew about it.

Also, as the Free Thought Project previously reported, in a book years ago, Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of notorious Medellín cartel drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, explains how his father “worked for the CIA.”

In the book, “Pablo Escobar In Fraganti,” Escobar, who lives under the pseudonym, Juan Sebastián Marroquín, explains his “father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America.”

Going even further down the rabbit hole, a History Channel series also addressed how US involvement in Afghanistan turned the country into a virtual heroin factory and how the drug war empowers cartels.

The final chapter of the series examines how the attacks on September 11thintertwined the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, transforming Afghanistan into a narco-state teeming with corruption. It also explores how American intervention in Mexico helped give rise to El Chapo and the Super Cartels, bringing unprecedented levels of violence and sending even more drugs across America’s borders.

Both the crack and heroin epidemics had similar effects when it came to the communities most harmed by the drug war — Black people. There have been dozens of studies highlighting the effects of the CIA’s clandestine crack operations which targeted minority neighborhoods and all of them have the same underlying theme — the destruction of the family.

For decades, millions of Black men — whose only “crime” was possession or sale of crack — were torn from their home and incarcerated. This led to millions more children growing up in fatherless environments which, in turn, put these future families in major deficits from their difficult childhoods. The effects have spanned decades and have turned once thriving communities into high-crime areas in which violence is the only constant.

When we add marijuana prohibition into the equation, the damage done to the American family through the enforcement of the drug war could be considered a crime against humanity.

Drug laws are now evolving but not fast enough. Despite knowing the effects of mass incarceration for victimless crimes, the state still aggressively pursues people for non-violent drug possession.

Perhaps with the release of a new study out of Oxford, Mississippi published in the journal Economic Inquiry, this paradigm of destroying families over the war on drugs subsides more quickly.

In the study, titled, Recreational marijuana legalization and admission to the foster-care system, a pair of economists with the University of Mississippi assessed foster care admission trends in states pre and post-legalization. What they found was both encouraging and infuriating at the same time.

“Legalization may impact foster-care admissions directly by changing the welfare of children or indirectly by changing policies and attitudes towards marijuana use in the home. Direct effects may arise because marijuana use itself causes behaviors that affect child welfare, or because it changes the likelihood of using other drugs,” the authors wrote.

“We also find that placements due to physical abuse, parental neglect, and parental incarceration decrease after legalization, providing evidence that legalization reduces substantive threats to child welfare, although the precise mechanism behind these effects is unclear.”

Imagine that. When parents aren’t torn from the home over substances deemed illegal by the state, children suffer less… Significantly less.

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Foster Family Kicked Out of Their Home to Make Room for Migrant Children

President Joe Biden has exacerbated a situation at the United States-Mexico border that can only be described as a crisis. Instead of addressing the problem sensibly, leftists are now booting American citizens from their homes in favor of migrant children.

Edmundo Serena Sanchez and his wife, Paual, have lived in a Renton, Washington State, home where they have fostered children for about seven years, KING-TV reported. They have fostered around 20 children during that time, and they were fostering four in February.

Despite this important work, the non-profit organization Friends of Youth, who owns the house and surrounding campus, has decided to kick them out.

“Friends of Youth has reviewed our organizational goals this past year, and we have chosen to pursue a different strategic vision,” they said in Jan. 29 letter. They went on to explain that the Renton house was needed “ … to provide a different scope of services in support of unaccompanied youth.”

The phrase “unaccompanied youth” is somewhat of a euphemism referring to the massive influx of children who have crossed the southern border without adult supervision since Biden took office. Friends of Youth apparently had no problem prioritizing these migrants over actual American families.

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Cops say sex traffickers sell foster kids on the weekends

Sex traffickers are selling foster kids on the weekends, 25 Investigates has uncovered.

Investigative Reporter Eric Rasmussen found cases of kids in foster care pimped out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then returned to their taxpayer-funded group homes on Monday.

Records obtained by 25 Investigates reveal a female staff member working with foster kids at the Eliot Atlantic House in Saugus is suspected of convincing a then 16-year-old girl at the group home to sell herself for sex on the weekends.Content Continues Below

That staff member told the foster child she “had a way they could make money together,” according to the report obtained by 25 Investigates.

The girl told investigators the staff member took her to Worcester three times and once to Boston “to have sex with unknown men for money” on the weekends.

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