In a recent campaign speech, the Texas senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke attacked a Texas law that permits private adoption agencies to refuse to place children with homosexual couples. His comments, writes David Closson, highlight the important need for such legal protections:

O’Rourke’s claim was based on a 2017 state law under which faith-based adoption agencies may decline to place children with same-sex couples because of sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage and human sexuality. Significantly, the Texas law does not prevent anyone from adopting, and even mandates that if an agency cannot work with a same-sex couple, it must direct the couple to another agency that will work with them. . . .

O’Rourke’s campaign rhetoric is just the latest in a series of attacks on the religious liberty of faith-based adoption providers. Dana Nessel, the Democratic candidate running for attorney general in Michigan, recently expressed similar hostility toward the beliefs of faith-based adoption providers. When asked about the 2015 Michigan law that protects the religious liberty of faith-based adoption agencies, Nessel admitted that if she’s elected she will disregard it because she “could not justify using the state’s money defending a law whose only purpose is discriminatory animus.” . . .

Meanwhile, the ACLU is suing the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services over the 2015 law, and a Clinton-appointed federal judge ruled on September 14 that the lesbian couples represented by the ACLU could proceed. . . .

But in the face of continued challenges to the ability of faith-based adoption providers to run their ministries without fear of reprisal, federal legislation . . . is needed.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.