Adoption should be colour-blind, not culture-blind

Would you let this woman adopt or foster your child?

It is racial discrimination to treat race as a primary factor in adoption. It is not religious discrimination to treat religion as a primary factor in adoption. One should never discriminate on the basis of race. One should discriminate on the basis of religion – at least in some areas. By discriminate, I don’t mean being prejudice against someone, I simply mean recognising a category distinction.

A media storm has erupted over the adoption of a five-year old ‘white Christian’ girl who was taken from her family and forced to live with two Muslim households over the past six months by Tower Hamlets council. One was a Muslim burkha-wearing foster carer who did not speak English. The girl was allegedly forced to learn Arabic.

The foster carers are said to have removed the cross around the girl’s neck. They reportedly told her Christmas and Easter are stupid and European women are alcoholics. The girl was also not allowed to eat spaghetti carbonara prepared by her biological mother because it contained bacon.

The child has now been reunited with her family after Judge Khatun Sapnara, a Muslim of Bangladeshi origin, ruled that the girl could live with her grandmother, who happens to be a non-practising Muslim.

Is this a clash of culture, or religion, or race? The court has ruled that it would be in the child’s best interests to let her live with a member of family who could meet her needs ‘in terms of ethnicity, culture and religion.’ By ethnicity, is the court saying that someone of another race cannot foster the girl?

The Children Act 1989 requires a local authority to consider ‘religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background’ when making decisions about a child who is in care as a result of a court order. Clearly, this is a confusion of categories. Why are race, culture and religion bundled into the same unholy basket?

What if a black or Asian non-religious couple wish to adopt a white child? Last week’s row has raised the uncomfortable questions of race and religion in adoption and foster parenting.

Sandeep Mander and his wife are non-practising second-generation British Sikhs. They think in English, let alone speaking English as their first language. They studied in Roman Catholic schools. Their closest friends are white British.

‘Yet on the basis that our parents came from India, we have been prevented from adopting any white British child. Given that we live in Berkshire, which is not exactly brimming with Sikh children in need of adoption, this means we have effectively been banned from adopting,’ Mr Mander writes in The Spectator.

The authorities denied them adoption based on ‘cultural heritage’ – a euphemism for their skin colour. Since I have debased myself talking about the colour of a person’s skin rather than the content of their character – let me say that Sikhs tend to have a much lighter skin colour than say South Indians.

SO WHAT? Who gives a flying fig about race and skin colour? The Left. The so-called Progressives have canonised race. They are obsessed with race. Race is the Holy Grail of Leftism. Race matters. This is the first dogma of the creed of a racist. It is the first dogma of the creed of Leftism. So who is the real racist here?

This is not liberalism but Leftism. Liberals were all in favour of colour blindness. The Civil Rights movement was about Martin Luther King Jr’s dream where his children would ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ ‘The colour of your skin is as irrelevant as the size of your shoe,’ says Jewish talk-show host Dennis Prager. Like a dog returning to his vomit, the Left have returned to the gutter of institutionalised racial prejudice.

It is now a micro-aggression at a number of universities to say you are colour blind. The University of California has a list of micro-aggressions among which are statements like: ‘There is only one race, the human race,’ ‘I don’t believe in race,’ or ‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job.’

Why then discriminate on the basis of religion? You don’t choose your race. You choose your religion. An adult is also free, in this country, to choose to reject the religion he or she was brought up in if they did grow up in a religious home (with the possible exception of Islam). Values are not based on race. But values are based on religion – even for atheists, like Douglas Murray, who would candidly acknowledge that many of the values of the West are rooted in our Judeo-Christian religious heritage.

A similar logic would apply to cultures. Traditional cultures have their roots in religion. ‘Culture’ is derived from the Latin cultura, which comes from cultus, meaning ‘worship.’

If I were giving a child for adoption I would want the child to be brought up in a conservative Christian or orthodox Jewish home. Skin colour, race and ethnicity wouldn’t make the slightest difference. I would certainly and defiantly discriminate on the basis of religion and culture.

I wouldn’t want my child to be brought up in a religion that stratified people on the basis of caste or trashed non-believers as infidels. Secularists would seize this as a good reason to eliminate all religion. But, of course, secularism has its own dogmas and worships at a different altar. I wouldn’t want my child to be adopted by parents who worship the Big State as God and teach a child to depend on it for handouts from birth to death. I wouldn’t want my child to be brought up by parents who can’t tell that male and female are distinct biological categories.

‘Ethnically I am Indian. Yet I am British, born and raised here, as is my wife. The fact that our parents were from India does not make us culturally Indian,’ writes Mr Mander. He’s right. The delicious irony is that someone born in New Delhi or Mumbai can grow up speaking the Queen’s English, reading Enid Blyton and P.G. Wodehouse, singing Byrd and Stanford, studying Chaucer and Shakespeare, while a majority in the London ghetto of Tower Hamlets speak Bengali and have created a near no-go zone for anything white, Western or traditionally British – except when it comes to fostering a ‘white Christian’ girl and forcing her to remove her cross.

(Originally published in The Conservative Woman)