A Jewish couple in Tennessee has accused the Holston United Methodist Home for Children of discrimination for declining to provide them with foster parent classes and home-study certification. Why has an organization that represents more than 2,000 rabbis come to Holston Home’s defense?

We plainly believe that a Jewish couple is no less qualified than a Christian one to raise a child. If Holston Home or any agency were discriminating against Jewish families we would find that abhorrent and condemn it. But that is not true of this case, and their observance of their religious tenets should not be mischaracterized. As deeply religious members of a minority community, we recognize the key difference between discrimination against others and affirming our own religious principles.

That a charity be able to work uniquely with co-religionists is a key freedom that Americans of all faiths, and especially American Jews, should seek to preserve. It is our principles and emphasis upon religious Jewish upbringing which have preserved our minority community through millennia of pressure, often at the tip of a sword, to abandon our beliefs. In order to preserve our own religious freedom, we must respect the right of Christian and other faith-based organizations to conduct themselves in ways that conform to their principles, too.

Stripping Holston Home of its funding and reducing its ability to provide foster care would specifically harm Tennessee’s most vulnerable children: those who lack parents able to care for and raise them into adulthood. Given the existing shortfall of homes open to foster care, the result would consign many children to languish in group homes rather than being placed in foster families who can care for them as individuals.

Altering current foster care law would endanger religious freedom for all and harm our nation’s most vulnerable children.