Washington foster parents score legal victory after state demanded they use children's preferred pronouns
Washington foster parents score legal victory after state demanded they use children's preferred pronouns
A Christian couple who spent more than a decade caring for foster children is celebrating a major legal victory after Washington state agreed to change its licensing rules following a dispute over requirements that foster parents use children's preferred pronouns and comply with gender identity policies, even when those requirements conflicted with their religious beliefs.
Shane and Jennifer DeGross told in an interview Wednesday that the dispute began in 2022, when they attempted to renew their foster care license and discovered the state had changed its requirements concerning gender identity.
The couple said they were willing to love and care for any child placed in their home but could not agree to certain state-imposed requirements they believed violated their .
"We were made aware that the state had updated and changed some of their requirements," Jennifer DeGross told Fox News Digital. "While we agreed that we would love and care for any child in our home, they had specific things that we could not agree to as Christians."
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Shane DeGross said the state required them to affirm the state's views on gender identity and human sexuality.
"Those views directly conflict with the biblical worldview of human sexuality," Shane DeGross said. "So, as Christians, we just couldn't accept that. Our allegiance is to God and the truth of Scripture. And we just couldn't abide by what they were requiring us to affirm."
Washington's licensing policies required foster parents to affirm and support LGBTQ children, including expectations concerning gender identity and the use of preferred names and pronouns. The DeGross family challenged the requirements on religious freedom grounds. Jennifer said the state eventually partially reinstated their license but restricted the ages of children they could foster.
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"We felt like even when they reinstated a partial license to us that they were still discriminating against us," she said.
"When a child reached 5, they had to be removed from our home," Jennifer said. "So not only was that upsetting to us, but that's not good for kids, right?"
Jennifer argued that such a restriction could disrupt a child's placement even if the child had already spent years living with a foster family.
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"If we had had a child for a couple of years, and then they have to be removed just because they turned or reached a certain age, it's definitely not in the interest of children," she said.
The legal battle resulted in a settlement under which Washington agreed to revise its foster care licensing rules, addressing the conflict between the state's gender identity requirements and foster parents' religious freedom claims.
Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, senior counsel at
