When Brian and Kaity Wuoti moved to Vermont, they witnessed the opioid crisis firsthand. The Wuotis, who already had two children at the time, quickly noticed that the unseen victims of the crisis were the children left without a home or security after families fell apart due to drug deaths, medical emergencies, or arrests.
“We started hearing about the overwhelming that was happening in the foster care system, and I got really pricked in my conscience that we could do something—we could help,” Kaity Wuoti, a stay-at-home mom, said in an interview with IW Features.
But in 2022, during a routine license renewal process, the Wuotis were asked a question about their level of comfort with fostering a child who identified as a member of the LGBT community. The family made it clear that they love and support all children, but also wanted to be clear with both the foster care system and any child potentially placed in their home that their religious beliefs about gender and sexuality inform their worldview and the way in which they parent.
“I had dysphoria as a child, and I never had random adults telling me to hate my own body, and I didn’t think it was helpful to children to be encouraged towards that mentality,” Kaity Wuoti explained.
The Wuotis were quickly informed that their license would not be renewed due to how they answered that question. At the time, the couple had adopted two children they had fostered and had five biological children.
“We were blindsided, it wasn’t even on our radar that they would take our license,” Kaity Wuoti said.
About two years after the Wuotis’ license was revoked, Bryan and Rebecca Gantt had their license to foster in the state of Vermont revoked for a similar reason. In 2023, the Gantts were set to foster a newborn born to a woman suffering a drug addiction when the state of Vermont learned of their religious beliefs regarding affirming LGBT children. The state not only refused to let them foster the newborn, but revoked their license entirely.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed suit on behalf of the Wuoti and Gantt families in February 2024, alleging that the state of Vermont was violating these Christian families’ religious and free speech rights by requiring them to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs and change how they express their beliefs in their own homes.
“We would have been content if the five children we had were the only ones God would ever have for us,” Brian Wuoti said. “We knew that this was still a hill worth dying on. We knew that adoption was this key value in our own family, and we wanted not only for our family to have the ability to get a foster license, we wanted others to be able to. Or if one day our own children, as adults, wanted to, as Christians, pursue fostering in Vermont, we didn’t want that to be lost to them.”
The period of time without their foster license was very rough for the Wuoti family. Kaity had five miscarriages during that time, and the prospect that their foster care journey could also be at an end was “heartbreaking.”
In May 2025, after an unfavorable ruling from a federal district court, ADF appealed their case to the 2nd Circuit. And in February 2026, Vermont officially adopted a policy that allowed Christian foster parents to abide by their own religious beliefs in regard to gender and sexuality without losing their foster license.
In light of this win, ADF dismissed the case just one month later.
“There are more kids in the foster care system than there are families to care for them,” Rebecca and Bryan Gantt said in a statement to IW Features. “Our focus throughout this case has been on the children who need stability and love above everything else. We’re overjoyed that Vermont is doing right by the children in the system.”
“We have been told that some people in the office are not crazy about the fact that we’re back in foster care,” Kaity Wuoti said, adding that most of the feedback from workers in the Vermont Department for Children and Families are nonetheless on their side.
“Another worker had said, ‘Well done. I know about the lawsuit. Well done. It was a huge violation of First Amendment rights,’” Kaity Wuoti recalled.
The Wuotis are hopeful that their win will have a ripple effect that encourages other Christian parents to enter the foster system in the state.
“Right after we won the case, we met a woman and foster care came up randomly in the conversation, and she said, ‘You know, I wanted to become a foster parent, but then I heard that they were requiring this from their foster parents, and I knew that they probably wouldn’t approve of me,’” Kaity Wuoti said. “And I said, ‘Well, well, what do you know? We won this lawsuit!’ And she was very excited that she could get involved.”
