Kids are being taken from ‘non-affirming’ parents.

this is pretty effed up

Kids are being taken from ‘non-affirming’ parents. Here’s one family’s fight to get their son back


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 identify as unsafe and harmful.



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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.

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