The U.S. Right Is Copying Hungary’s Attack on Adoption

This spring, Tennessee passed a first-of-its-kind law that protects the rights of adults who object to LGBTQ+ identity on moral or religious grounds to foster and adopt LGBTQ-identifying kids. Tennessee’s move came partly in response to a considered Department of Health and Human Services rule designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids. The federal change, passed shortly after the Tennessee bill, was a reversal of a Trump administration decision to remove nondiscrimination protections.

It’s a chilling law, one that echoes the most virulent anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes pushed across a number of Western democracies. The policy sets up the family as an instrument for disciplining unwanted elements in society, following the model established by Hungary, Russia, and others.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary amended the constitution in 2020 for the purpose of redefining family and stripping same-sex couples of their parental rights. The change defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Non-married people require special permission to adopt children. As a government official put it, “The main rule is that only married couples can adopt a child, that is, a man and a woman who are married.” The constitution now defines family as “based on marriage and the parent-child relation. The mother is a woman, the father a man.” It goes on to declare, “Hungary defends the right of children to identify with their birth gender and ensures their upbringing based on our nation’s constitutional identity and values based on our Christian culture.”

In a country where pro-natalist subsidies bolster family planning through grants for families to purchase homes to the abolition of income tax for mothers who give birth to or raise at least four children, circumscribing same-sex couples as ineligible to foster or adopt is more than an act of cultural and economic discrimination. It’s an attempt at annihilation.

Tunde Furesz is the president of the Hungarian Maria Kopp Institute for Demography and Families and previously worked in the government as deputy secretary of state responsible for family policy and demography. In an interview with the Hungarian Conservative, she addressed criticism of Hungary’s family policies by saying, “Attacks on family policy, on the Fundamental Law and now on the child protection act are always ideological attacks. Right now, Hungary is against LGBTQ propaganda.” As to the appropriateness of Hungary’s discriminatory policies, she asserted that “every state has the sovereign right to prioritize which groups of society are to be focused on.”

This is a crucial point, because Furesz is drawing out exactly what’s at stake in the Tennessee law and so many other instances of anti-LGBTQ+ and discriminatory family policy. It is a question of what kind of country is being built, beginning with one of the smallest and most rudimentary units within society. How the family is defined and how the contours of parental rights and the nascent individualism of the child are traced posit fundamental ideas about who we are, how we relate to one another, and the boundaries between our freedom and society’s demands.

Of course, perhaps no other European state has been as pioneering in its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda as President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Gay adoptions were banned in 2013, around the same time a ban on gay “propaganda” was implemented. A ban on adoptions by international same-sex couples came in 2014. Putin has repeatedly portrayed LGBTQ+ rights and other liberal ideals as a form of Western cultural aggression. He reiterated this in his speech announcing the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.”

More recently, the Russian Supreme Court banned the “international LGBT social movement” as an extremist organization in November. In early 2024, the first convictions were handed out: a man in Volgograd for posting a picture of a pride flag and a woman in Nizhny Novgorod for wearing LGBTQ+ earrings. The man paid a 1,000-ruble fine, and the woman spent five days in detention.

But it’s Orban’s regime that has become a particularly popular rhetorical and policy touchstone for right-wingers in the United States. Americans who want to learn from Hungary’s illiberal cultural crusade in order to reshape this country see much to import. This spring, Gladden Pappin, the American academic and Catholic integralist who now works as the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, told an interviewer from the National Catholic Register that “American conservative politicians need to ask: What positively can I do to make the traditional family more likely to survive? Sometimes it’s implementing the anti-woke policies in education. … But with changing mindsets, we need to think ahead about how to increase the likelihood that people will choose the family life they really want.”

Rod Dreher, another right-wing American expat in Orban’s orbit, has characterized Hungary as standing athwart the gates of European history, defending values against a woke horde: “For example, even as European Union inquisitors are trying to punish Hungary for protecting its children from LGBT propaganda, Disney—Disney!—in Germany has greenlighted a new series for youth about a teenager who has sex with Satan and falls pregnant with the devil’s baby. Not a peep from the bespoke Huns of Brussels about that. The real threat, you see, is from retrograde Christians like Viktor Orban, who believe things about family that most Europeans did seemingly the day before yesterday.”

On this side of the Atlantic, right-wingers are fond of parental rights arguments, but this commitment falters when the parents in question are LGBTQ+ or when they affirm such identities in their children.

Policies like Tennessee’s and the wider environment of hostility toward LGBTQ+ people also decrease the likelihood that potential LGBTQ+ parents will seek to foster or adopt. Polling from Gallup shows that LGBTQ+ adults are more likely to consider fostering or adopting, but they also report high levels of concern about possible discrimination in the process. The deterrent effects of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination are visible, with nearly half of LGBTQ+ men reporting that fear of discrimination poses a “major barrier to fostering and adopting.”

These measures are not limited to Tennessee. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, this February, right-wing commentator Michael Knowles declared that “true freedom is a national policy based on what we know in our hearts as morally right” and went on to attack same-sex couples and the practice of surrogacy, insisting that “children are people and no one has a right to another person.” Last week, Gabriella Gambino, the Vatican’s undersecretary for the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life moderated a panel at the U.N.’s Geneva headquarters on the need to abolish interns surrogacy. Gambino referred to international surrogacy as “procreative tourism.” Italy’s Minister for Family, Natality, and Equal Opportunities, Eugenia Roccella, also participated.

Last year, during a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene attacked American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who is gay, as “not a biological mother.” Parents’ rights tend, however, to mainly run in one direction: exerting control over trans youth. Tennessee passed a law in May that criminalizes adults who assist minors in receiving out-of-state gender-affirming care without parental or guardian consent and another that would require schools to out trans students to their parents.

I am adopted myself, and I’ve written before about some of the thorny challenges around adoption and its ethics. But in places like Nashville and Budapest, what we find are not moral gray areas or troubling dilemmas. There is only the use of state power to impose a rigid concept of family and to further marginalize a minority under the guise of defending values and honoring would-be parents.

The hard-line approach to cultural issues in Republican-dominated states threatens to turn parts of America into places that more closely resemble the illiberal regimes of Europe’s backsliding democracies rather than the fully free society the United States is at the national level. In places like Tennessee, just as in Orban’s Hungary, the sort of society being molded and the kind of family being promoted are exclusionary, regressive, and profoundly illiberal.