I Have Initialed Boxes I Did Not Read to Get Something I Wanted. Oregon Asked a Widow With Five Children to Initial One She Did Not Believe Before It Would Let Her Love a Sixth. On September 9 the State Signed Instead. Read Paragraph Five.

The last form I signed without reading was a waiver at a trampoline park. Eleven boxes, eleven sets of initials, under a minute, because my son was already at the door with his socks on. I have signed things I did not read. I have also signed things I did not believe, which is worse, and I remember every one of those.

Jessica Bates read hers.

In 2023 she was a widow in Malheur County, in the dry eastern corner of Oregon, raising five children on her own, and she felt, in her words, God nudging her to adopt. She applied to the state's Department of Human Services to take a child out of foster care. The certification came with a rule, OAR 413-200-0308(2)(k), and the rule came with a conversation. Would she use a child's chosen pronouns? Would she take a child to a pride parade? Would she take a hypothetical nine-year-old for puberty blockers or hormone shots? She said she would love and accept any child the state placed with her. She said she would not say or do those particular things. Oregon told her that made her ineligible for every child in its care. Not the teenager who might need those things. Every child. An infant. A child who shared her faith.

That is the box she would not initial. The state closed the file.

What happened next took three years. Bates sued in the spring of 2023, with Alliance Defending Freedom as her lawyers, lost in the district court that year, and appealed. In July 2025 the Ninth Circuit ruled she was likely to win on both her free speech claim and her free exercise claim. Oregon then agreed to a preliminary injunction so she could restart her application. And on September 9, Judge Adrienne Nelson signed a stipulated order and final judgment that both sides had asked for together. The case is closed. The state pays her legal fees.

Read the order. It is two pages long.

Paragraphs one through four undo the box. Oregon must rescind its rejection and let her apply again. It may not deny her for what she believes about marriage and the body, may not require her "to agree to use prescribed words or language, including chosen pronouns," and may not keep any per se rule that screens her out in advance.

Then comes paragraph five, and paragraph five is where the honesty lives. Nothing in the order, it says, stops the department from deciding a child's placement "based on its individualized consideration of the child's needs and of a foster parent's concerns or limitations (including where religiously motivated)." The state may still say no to Bates for a particular child. It may not say no to Bates for all children. It gave up the checkbox. It kept the conversation.

I expected to resent that paragraph. I have come to think it is the best thing in the document. A child in foster care is not a principle. A fourteen-year-old does not need a home that has won an argument; she needs a home that can carry what she is carrying, and there are homes, devout ones included, that cannot carry every child. Bates never claimed otherwise. Her claim was narrower and older than the culture war that swallowed it: do not make me say what I do not believe in order to do what I believe I am called to do. Thomas More went to the block over an oath he could not swear; the play about him says a man taking an oath holds himself in his own hands like water. Bates was not asked to die. She was asked to open her hands a little, and she would not.

There is a verse for this, and it is not the one about pronouns. James says the religion God accepts looks like visiting orphans and widows in their affliction. Bates is the widow. She wanted to visit the orphans. For three years the state of Oregon stood in the middle of the sentence.

Here is the pluralist move. Paragraph five protects the Muslim foster mother in Texas whose limits are religious too, and the progressive couple in a red state who would not pledge to raise a child in a church. A look at a real child and a real family, instead of a litmus test in the training packet, is the only version of this system that can hold all of us at once. The liberty Bates won shields the person who would have voted against her. That is how you know it is liberty and not a spoil.

So a checkbox came off a form in one state, and a woman with five children can walk back into an office in Malheur County and start again, three years older, with the same yes and the same no she walked in with the first time.

I still sign waivers I do not read. But I have started noticing which boxes ask what I am willing to do and which ask what I am willing to say, and I have started treating the second kind the way she did. Slowly. Every line. Because somewhere in Oregon there is a child who needs a home, and the person best able to give it may be the one who would not lie to get through the door.

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Sources

Stipulated Order and Judgment, Bates v. Pakseresht, No. 2:23-cv-00474-AN (D. Or., filed September 9, 2026), ECF 68, Judge Adrienne Nelson: https://adflegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/bates-v-wendt-2026-09-09-stipulated-order-judgment.pdf

Alliance Defending Freedom press release, September 14, 2026: "Oregon mother is free to adopt after winning legal battle over gender-ideology mandate" https://adflegal.org/press-release/oregon-mother-is-free-to-adopt-after-winning-legal-battle-over-gender-ideology-mandate/

Bates v. Pakseresht, 146 F.4th 772 (9th Cir. July 24, 2025), cited in the stipulated order at 784 to 801 (opinion not reopened this run; the holding is stated here only as the order and the ADF release describe it): https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/07/24/23-4169.pdf