And some religious leaders have refused to provide adoption services to gay couples.
The tone can be stern, as when he describes the threat to religious liberty he sees in the government's taking government contracts away from Catholic charities for refusing to offer adoption services to same-sex couples.
And some states have taken up legislation that would allow taxpayer-funded contractors that oversee state adoptions to refuse to let gay or lesbian individuals adopt children if it conflicts with the organization's religious beliefs.
If the adoption organization refused to allow, say, African-Americans to post on its site, I presume you'd refuse to work with it.
My baby wasn't planned, but I refused an abortion or adoption.
In refusing to declare the adoption of the new rules "arbitrary and capricious," as the coalition of groups argued, Justice William A. Wetzel held that their adoption was "well within the authority" of the state.
The State Department currently refuses to approve adoptions from Cambodia and Vietnam to pressure those countries to install safeguards so that children with biological relatives who can care for them are not shipped overseas, officials say.
Indiana's neighbor Michigan also drew a sharp rebuke from same-sex marriage proponents this year, after Republican governor Rick Snyder signed a law that allows faith-based adoption agencies to refuse service to gay couples.
His speech, billed by Catholic officials as the most important of the visit, is part of a Vatican fightback against the kind of secularism in Western societies that the Pope believes threatens the rights of religious people to practise their faith openly, such as the right for Catholic adoption agencies to refuse their services to homosexual couples.
Paul Boateng argued: Some local authorities still refuse to place children for adoption because one of the prospective parents is 40-plus, or is deemed the wrong colour, or smokes, or because of the belief that the family must be kept together, no matter what, even at the expense of the child's best interest.
