The Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, with the court asked to decide whether the city of Philadelphia can bar Catholic Social Services from screening future foster parents. Stephen Vider, assistant professor of history and director of Cornell's Public History Initiative, writes in a New York Times op-ed co-authored with David S. Byers, assistant professor of social work at Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research and a postdoctoral associate at the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research at Cornell, that the case could upend, in the name of religious freedom, 50 years of progress in the effort to provide better support for L.G.B.T.Q. children in the foster system.
"If the court’s conservative majority rules in favor of Catholic Social Services, the most obvious losers would be prospective lesbian and gay foster parents," Vider writes in the piece. "Yet those with the biggest stake are L.G.B.T.Q. children and adolescents."
