John was out shopping for his youngest son’s birthday in July 2021 when he received a panicked call from his wife. A state child welfare worker and police officers were at their home, trying to take away their autistic son. The social worker claimed the Christian family’s refusal to affirm his apparently newfound sexual orientation was child abuse.
John raced home in time to record a video of the harrowing encounter.
“I’m going to take the child with me,” Edwina Nimley, a casework specialist for the Maryland Department of Human Services, can be heard saying in a video of the incident reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Though the boy refused to go with her, Nimley tried again. “You’re afraid of me? You have nothing to be afraid of. The police is here but you have to go. This is the law,” Nimley said in the recording. “I need to talk to you separately from your parents. I need to take him to a safe place, separate from your parents.”
John’s son, who was 16 at the time, remained with his parents that July day, but John’s battle for custody of his son was far from over.
At the time of the social worker’s visit, John Doe II and Jane Doe — who asked to remain anonymous to protect their privacy — lived with their children in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where the local child welfare department had adopted a radical transgender affirmation program that views Christian parents who don’t “affirm” their child’s transgender or homosexual identity as unsafe and harmful.
John told the Daily Caller News Foundation that he and his wife were accused of abuse surrounding their son’s apparent LGBT identity, an allegation that shocked the family who had never seen evidence of their son expressing an alternative sexual orientation. In fact, about a month after Nimley’s police-escorted visit, John said he and his wife received a letter saying the child welfare case was closed.
But less than six months later, John and Jane would lose custody of their son after refusing to affirm him as a transgender girl during a stay at Children’s National Hospital.
“It sounds like a movie. It really does,” John told the DCNF.
African-American, devout Christian and military veteran parents John and Jane have had their family life turned upside down and find themselves pitted against state officials dead set on removing kids from so-called “non-affirming” parents and a legal system seemingly aimed at punishing Christian families.
The DCNF used interviews, legal documents and public records requests to piece together how an “affirming” child welfare system worked against John and Jane’s religious freedoms and parental rights, while inflicting emotional and psychological trauma from having their eldest son taken from them.
‘Non-Affirming’
In 2017, Prince George’s County Department of Social Services (PGCDSS) became one of the first child welfare programs in the country with an AFFIRM unit, a program that rejects a male-female understanding of sex and instead teaches social workers, children, and families to proactively “affirm,” meaning to validate, support, and embrace gender ideology.
PGCDSS described the program in their August 2019 newsletter writing, “AFFIRM works with young people in the foster care system whose families have trouble accepting their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression or who experience bullying in school or other forms of abuse. The program gives youth coping skills and teaches parents and caregivers how to validate and support their children’s LGBTQ identities and experience.”
Under a $10 million federal research grant, the county devised social services interventions that aimed to “overhaul” child welfare systems and developed programs which train parents, caregivers, and staff to be affirming of LGBTQ youth. Their research and programs have served as a nationwide model and are being recommended federally by the Biden-Harris administration.
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At the hospital, John and Jane were informed by staff for the first time of their son’s alleged gender dysphoria and told they must affirm his new female gender identity, according to a lawsuit filed by the parents against Children’s National. The lawsuit states that the Christian couple hold “traditional family values consistent with their evangelical Protestant faith” and would not affirm their son as a female, despite the hospital’s demands.
“They didn’t like the fact that we wouldn’t go along with what they were recommending,” John told the DCNF of the hospital’s reaction.
Children’s National Hospital filed a series of emergency holds preventing John III from leaving the facility and demanded the parents treat him as a girl, initiate sex-change interventions, and
“convert to the ‘new Christianity’ by engaging in faith-conversion sessions” with the hospital’s non-binary, transgender chaplain, Lavender Kelly, according to the lawsuit.
John told the DCNF they were asked to stop reading certain passages of the Bible that affirm traditional sexual values and gender.
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Much more:
https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/17/...-affirming-parents-one-family-fight-son-back/
