--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- John Bickley: The NFL is back, and FanDuel's got everything you need to play your game. From same-game parlays to live betting. Right now, new customers bet $5 and get $300 in bonus bets if you win. 21-plus in president select states. 18-plus in Kentucky and Wyoming. Must be first online real money waging. $5 deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at FanDuel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.
--:-- John Bickley: Last week, our coverage of the new film Sound of Hope, the story of Possum Trot, specifically how it exemplifies the role Christians play in providing homes to foster children, drew many comments from our listeners. Many were unaware of new Biden administration rules effectively requiring people to pass an LGBT litmus test in order to adopt and foster.
--:-- John Bickley: In this episode, Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham follows up with a new poll that shows how voters feel about the new federal rules. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's June 30th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Brandon: Hey guys, producer Brandon here. Black Rifle Coffee is a veteran-founded company that's doing their part to honor both current and former military personnel, as well as first responders. They support such organizations as the Wounded Warrior Project, Adopt-a-Cop, BJJ, and the Burn Institute. Right now, you can get 25% off your first subscription order when you verify your military ID online. Just go to BlackRifleCoffee.com, create an account, and verify your ID. Visit BlackRifleCoffee.com to learn more.
--:-- John Bickley: Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham joins us now to give us the details on polling regarding this new HHS rule and how lawmakers and the public are responding.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, so at the end of April, the Department of Health and Human Services enacted the Safe and Appropriate Foster Care Placement Requirements. Now, that's a mouthful, but what they do is they require child welfare agencies to place foster children only with care providers who will promise to do things like use a child's identified pronouns and chosen name and allow the child to wear clothes that, quote, reflect their self-identified gender identity and expression. So presumably to dress as the opposite sex, for example.
--:-- Megan Basham: These rules would also require foster parents to establish, quote, an environment that supports the child's LGBTQ status or identity. And that's something that legal experts warn could be interpreted to mean anything from providing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to surgical interventions.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, this new federal policy is not scheduled to take effect until 2026, so we could have a different administration by then who would undo this. But we are seeing similar policies already being enforced in a number of blue states like Oregon, Massachusetts, and Maine.
--:-- Megan Basham: This was what former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard told us at the Faith and Freedom Conference just a few days ago. I know personally, foster parents in Maine, it was actually one of the editors for my book. I wrote about this in my book and she just sent me a personal note on the side as she was proofing it, saying, well, this is what we are going through in my family, that they are longtime foster parents, have taken care of many, many children.
--:-- Megan Basham: They have just had their license to be foster parents taken away purely because they refuse to sign the paper that says they will use whatever pronoun that a child that they are caring for demands that they use because it goes against their religious beliefs.
--:-- Megan Basham: And after last week episode aired I emailed with the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. They're representing two Vermont families who say that their foster care licenses were revoked for opposing the state's gender identity policy.
--:-- Megan Basham: So both of these couples, Brian and Katie Wodey and Michael and Rebecca Gantt are Christians, and they began fostering 10 years ago after they saw the need that the opioid crisis was creating in their communities. They've also adopted children from the foster care system. And like one of the main characters in the film Sound of Hope, Bishop W.C. Martin, both of these men are pastors.
--:-- Megan Basham: But when the families went to get relicensed, they were asked whether they would be willing to do things like take the foster child to pride parades or would they be willing to use transgender pronouns. And when they said no, they couldn't do that because of their faith. They say that their foster licenses were denied, even though they previously had what they described as excellent relationships with Vermont's Department of Children and Families.
--:-- Megan Basham: So this is what Michael Gant said in an interview with the Heritage Foundation a few weeks ago. Then we were offered to be reeducated and given the choice that they could either revoke our fostering license or they would give us up to a year to change our faith. And I said, no, we're not going to change our faith in the next year. Absolutely not.
--:-- Megan Basham: Their lawsuit claims the state is now, quoting from that suit, excluding all families with traditional religious beliefs about human sexuality from fostering or adopting any child.
--:-- Megan Basham: So this kind of thing is very much happening right now.
--:-- Megan Basham: Okay, so let's talk about how American voters feel about this sort of thing. So the Daily Wire, which produces this show, commissioned a poll from RMG Research that touches on the new HHS rules, as well as the state-level regulations.
--:-- Megan Basham: What did the poll find? Well, it found that these policies are deeply unpopular. So this poll was of 1,000 registered voters, and an overwhelming majority, nearly 70%, say that it is good for religious families to adopt a foster child. Only 13% say that it's a bad thing.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, when it came to religious families who oppose transgender ideology, less than a third of voters, 29%, agree that they should be banned from adopting because they refuse to affirm a child's gender dysphoria. And nearly 60% feel that parents who will not agree to provide puberty blockers or gender transition surgeries or really just otherwise support transgender identities are better for kids than those who will.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, as we would expect, Republicans overwhelmingly favor religious foster families. 78% of GOP voters think that kids benefit by being placed with foster parents who believe that biological males are boys and biological females are girls. But also among those who prefer families with traditional gender beliefs for foster care, 58% of independents.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, it seems like the natural question a lot of people are going to have is why the Biden administration is making moves like this that are so unpopular.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, the Biden administration stated in its announcement that it was enacting this policy because LGBTQ children are overrepresented in foster care. And that is true. So research shows that around 30 percent of youth in foster care identify as LGBTQ compared to only 11 percent of youth who are not in foster care.
--:-- Megan Basham: And kids in foster care are five times more likely to say that they're transgender. So the question is why the rate for transgender identities is so much higher for these foster kids And the administration says it because of the bias that the LGBTQ community faces But on the other side of the aisle many conservatives feel it because believing one is another gender is correlated with other mental health struggles And foster children, by virtue of the trauma and neglect in a lot of their backgrounds, are more prone to those struggles.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Dr. Jeff Myers, who is president of Summit Ministries, recently illustrated that position on the conservative TV network Real America's Voice. The federal government sees that mental health struggles are bad in this group. These kids are not healthy. They're really struggling. But they have decided on an ideological basis, not on a medical basis, that by giving gender-affirming care to these children, we will somehow help them. And this ignores or short circuits the real issue, which is unresolved childhood trauma, which is the case for almost all of these kids in this system.
--:-- Megan Basham: And while the film Sound of Hope doesn't delve into these LGBTQ issues, it does show the foster children having other identity issues. Like one child who has been so abused, she sometimes retreats into thinking she's a cat.
--:-- Megan Basham: So we spoke to Bishop Martin, whose experience of adopting foster children is portrayed in The Sound of Hope. It shows how 22 families in his church, Bethel Chapel, adopted all 77 children out of their local foster care system. And he described how he and his wife and the other families had to work through those struggles with children.
--:-- Megan Basham: How does a child understand the beauty of a mother and a father that nobody never spent the time to teach them? How do they know how to love God with no one? So these are struggles. They have all kind of baggage, lying, stealing, just whatever you name. They come in with that mindset. Only thing we see is a whole lot of the bad, hard-headed children. You expect that. You look for that. Because why? If no one teach them and show them and love them through their heart and pain like God, he did the same thing. He loved us through our hurts, our pain, because we all been just messed up.
--:-- Megan Basham: But had not been for the Lord on our side, we'll still be jacked up, messed up, and tore up from the floor. But God saw fit to give us another chance.
--:-- Megan Basham: So critics say that that expression of love through faith that Bishop Martin believes transformed these children is what's being potentially imperiled with these new litmus tests.
--:-- Megan Basham: But beyond the stated reasons the Biden administration is giving for why they're doing this, I do think it's important to note that this policy is not unpopular with his Democrat base. They were the outliers in this poll. Nearly two thirds of them believe that it's more beneficial for a foster child to be adopted by a family that supports transgender ideologies for underage children than to be adopted by a family that supports traditional views on gender.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, you know, we've covered here reports about how Biden may be losing his grip on the Black vote. In 2020, Trump garnered 8% of the Black vote, but a recent Pew poll put him at something like 18%, so big swing.
--:-- Megan Basham: Is this an area where Biden's out of step with what was the Democrats' most loyal voting bloc? Yeah, I'd say that that is definitely a possibility.
--:-- Megan Basham: So just to throw a few more numbers at you, two-thirds of Black Americans are Protestants, And a Pew poll in 2022 found that only 22% of them believe that gender can change. So this administration would seem ideologically out of step with black Christians, at least, on this issue.
--:-- Megan Basham: And Mark Robinson the Republican running for governor in North Carolina says the Democrats disconnect with black voters on matters of faith as well as other issues like crime and illegal immigration is costing them It blatant what the Biden administration and those of their ilk want to do with folks like us who believe in Jesus Christ who believe this is greatest nation on earth and quite frankly believe in morality period They want to push us out of the equation. They want to push us out of politics.
--:-- Megan Basham: You know as well as I do that black folks are just as tired of this garbage as everybody else. Tulsi Gabbard agrees with that and says that the foster care issue highlights the growing disconnect that Democrats have with religious voters overall.
--:-- Megan Basham: I experienced as a vice chair of the DNC and going around in a lot of these circles when I was serving in Congress over the years, an increase at a basic level, just a discomfort when people mention God or open a meeting with a prayer and targeting people of faith and spirituality, especially Christians.
--:-- Megan Basham: So it's no wonder why so many Christians and people of faith recognize the danger of what happens when you have a party in power trying to remove even any mention of God from every facet of our public life.
--:-- Megan Basham: So I think for Christians of every racial demographic, these foster care policies stand to further exacerbate a growing divide from Democrats.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah. We know that when this new HHS rule was still a proposal and opened a public comment, eight attorneys general sent a letter saying it's unconstitutional and discriminates against religious families.
--:-- Megan Basham: Obviously, that was not heeded by the Biden administration. Do Republicans plan to have a legislative response?
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah. So, you know, I would say that that still seems to be an evolving question. As I mentioned earlier, they may be hoping that the courts beat this back. And certainly the Supreme Court has tended to take a very favorable view of religious liberty cases, even among some of the liberal justices.
--:-- Megan Basham: And as far as legislation goes, Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana put forward a bill that would block HHS's new rule and prevent child welfare agencies from denying prospective foster parents who hold to traditional gender norms. But that bill seems to have stalled out in committee.
--:-- Megan Basham: Meanwhile, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley told us that Republicans will be working to stop this rule from taking effect in 2026 if Biden is indeed reelected.
--:-- Megan Basham: Oh, it's such an outrageous violation of religious liberty. I mean, it's just that violates the fundamental tenets of millions and millions and millions of Americans. And it's part of this administration's attempt to impose their values, which are not shared by the majority of the country, impose them by force on the rest of this nation.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, it's outrageous. There's such an authoritarian streak to what this administration does, throwing their political opponents in jail, going after Christians, imposing their beliefs on others. We've got to stop it.
--:-- Megan Basham: And Holly's colleague in the Senate, Oklahoma's James Langford, really got at why this is such an important issue on the local level.
--:-- Megan Basham: So in my state, we ran these numbers several years ago. We have the same number of kids that are actually in the foster care or in child protective services and foster care right now as we have the number of churches in our state. Literally, if one family from each church would be a foster family, we would have no kids that are in our child protective systems.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the significance is probably true for most states on this. If one family from each church would be that family that they're going to adopt or they're going to foster, it would wipe out the needs that are in that state and it would give that child an opportunity and real hope.
--:-- Megan Basham: And that's really what this movie, Sound of Hope, illustrates.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, we said it last time, but I'll say it again here. The most important thing we have to consider on this issue is not politics, but the well-being of kids.
--:-- John Bickley: Yep. Can't be said enough.
--:-- John Bickley: Megan, thank you so much for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: Anytime.
--:-- [Theme music starts playing]
--:-- John Bickley: That was Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
