UPDATE, November 13, 2:24 p.m.: The Associate Press reports that Judge Scott Johansen has reversed his decision to remove a baby from her lesbian foster parents.

A Utah juvenile court judge has ordered an infant girl be taken from lesbian foster parents and placed with a heterosexual couple, saying children in homosexual homes don’t do as well as they do in heterosexual homes, despite volumes of evidence to the contrary.

The order, issued Tuesday by Judge Scott Johansen, has raised concerns at the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, agency spokesperson Ashley Sumner told the Associated Press. Sumner told the AP that agency attorneys plan to review the decision and determine what options they have to challenge the order.

The ruling came during a routine hearing for Utah couple Beckie Peirce, 34, and April Hoagland, 38, the AP reported.

They told the AP that the judge cited research that children do better when they are raised by heterosexual couples, though Johansen would not share that research after passing down his decision. Hoagland said she believes the judge imposed his religious beliefs on his ruling.

“We are shattered,” Hoagland told a Salt Lake City TV station. “It hurts me really badly because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The couple told the Washington Post they married after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Utah child services officials licensed the couple as foster parents earlier this year, as the Post reported. And in August, the newlyweds welcomed a one-year-old girl into their home. Their plans to adopt the child were approved by the baby’s biological mother, the Post reported.

“I was kind of caught off guard because I didn’t think anything like that would happen anymore,” Hoagland told KUTV.

Hoagland told KUTV that Johansen, a juvenile court judge in Utah’s Seventh District, said “through his research he had found out that kids in homosexual homes don’t do as well as they do in heterosexual homes.” When the judge was asked to show the research, she said he wouldn’t.

Johansen has a history of erratic behavior in the courtroom. The Utah Judicial Conduct Commission in 1997 charged that Johansen had “[demeaned] the judicial office” after slapping a 16-year-old boy in the courtroom, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. Johansen in 2014 offered to reduce a teenager’s community service if her mother would chop off the girl’s ponytail in the courtroom, according to the Tribune.

Agency spokesperson Sumner told the AP that she couldn’t discuss the specifics of the case but confirmed that the couple’s account of the ruling is accurate: The judge’s decision was based on the couple being lesbians. The agency isn’t aware of any other issues with their performance as foster parents.

Sumner told the AP the couple is part of a group of same-sex married couples who were allowed to become foster parents in Utah after last summer’s legalization of marriage equality.

As of Wednesday, agency officials said they had not seen the judge’s order, but were left in a bind.

“On the one hand, I’m not going to expect my caseworkers to violate a court order,” said Brent Platt, director of the Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS). “But on the other hand, I’m not going to expect my caseworkers to violate the law.”

The decision flies in the face of the “prevailing professional consensus that the sexual orientation of parents has nothing to do with their ability to be good parents,” according to a Human Rights Campaign (HRC) statement released Wednesday.

There is “overwhelming evidence that children being raised by same-sex parents are just as healthy and well-adjusted as those with different-sex parents,” Chad Griffin, president of HRC, said in the statement. “At a time when so many children in foster care need loving homes, it is sickening to think that a child would be taken from caring parents who planned to adopt.”

The organization pointed to a body of research that indicates parents’ orientation has no bearing on a child’s mental health and social development. Studies have documented that LGBTQ adults are willing to adopt the very children most in need of homes and those who wait the longest in temporary foster care—those who are older and who may have special needs—and do so at a higher rate than non-LGBTQ adults, according to the group.

HRC cited a 2013 survey by the Child Welfare League of America, which showed that in Utah there were 2,706 children placed in out-of-home care, and more than 600 of them were waiting to be adopted.

Utah officials estimate there are about a dozen foster parents in the state who are same-sex married couples, according to the AP. It’s unclear what effect, if any, the decision will have on those couples.

In a recent Gallup survey, six in ten Utah residents said they belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church officials voted last week to exclude the children of same-sex couples until they are adults, a decision now facing protest from within the church.