A Philadelphia-based case centered on whether or not taxpayer-funded adoption agencies can legally discriminate against LGBTQ+ people will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on November 4, 2020.
WLP recently joined an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief filed by National Women’s Law Center supporting the City of Philadelphia and intervenors Support Center for Child Advocates and Philadelphia Family Pride, represented by the ACLU.
Read or download the brief here.
The case, Fulton v. Philadelphia, arose out of a dispute between the City of Philadelphia and a Catholic foster care agency. The City terminated the contract after Catholic Social Services refused to place children with LGBTQ+ people seeking to open their home to care for children in need. They also refuse to place children with opposite-sex couples if they are not legally married.
Currently, more than 5,000 children are in the Philadelphia foster care system.
Philadelphia’s Fair Practices Ordinance prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, and other protected identities and covers all city contractors.
In the litigation, Catholic Social Services of Philadelphia claims it does not need to comply with Philadelphia’s anti-discrimination laws and is attempting to force the City to reinstate their taxpayer-funded foster care services contract. They argue that discriminating against LGBTQ+ applicants is an expression of religious freedom protected by the First Amendment.
The amicus brief argues in support of the City of Philadelphia and LGBTQ+ people who want to foster or adopt children and outlines the broad implications of this decision:
“If this Court accepts the position that those who object to non-discrimination requirements are shielded from compliance by the first amendment’s free exercise or free speech clauses, it will expose women and girls to the risk of greater discrimination in all aspects of their lives, as detailed herein, particularly because sex discrimination is often rooted in religious beliefs.”
The Court should uphold the sound logic of long-standing precedent to ensure civil rights protections, including the ones at issue here, remain in place. Otherwise, the Court is inviting legal challenges seeking an evisceration of neutral and generally applicable anti-discrimination laws, potentially resulting in a host of pervasive harms to LGBTQ people and women.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing and defending the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond.
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