Kentucky Adoption Religious Freedom Bill (HB 160)

HB 160 would allow a religious organization or an individual employed by a religious organization to refuse to provide foster care or adoption services to a person if the action would cause the organization or individual to violate a “sincerely held religious belief.”

The bill defines “foster care or adoption services” to mean social services provided to or on behalf of children. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Assisting abused or neglected children;
• Teaching children and parents occupational, homemaking, and other domestic skills;
• Promoting foster parenting;
• Providing foster homes, residential care, group homes, or temporary group shelters for children;
• Recruiting of foster parents;
• Placing children in foster homes;
• Operation of foster homes;
• Promoting adoption or recruiting adoptive parents;
• Assisting adoptions or supporting adoptive families;
• Performing or assisting home studies;
• Assisting kinship care givers or fictive kin caregivers;
• Providing family preservation services;
• Providing family support services; and
• Providing temporary or permanent family reunification services.

The bill would protect a person or entity that refuses such services due to religious beliefs from any civil or criminal cause of action by the state.

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If passed, the law would allow child adoption and foster placement agencies the right to discriminate in, or refuse, the services they offer to LGBTQ families and children.

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Latest Action

1/11/19 – Introduced.

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People