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eNews for Faith-Based Organizations
November 15, 2011

Editor: Stanley Carlson-Thies
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In this issue
Briefing Video: Are Faith-Based Services Discriminatory?
Belmont Abbey College Sues to Stop Contraception Mandate
Charitable Donation Disincentive On the Way?
S 598: The (Dis)Respect for Marriage Act
Dolan's Decree: Archdiocese of New York Policy on Same-Sex Marriage
Jonathan Rauch Asks: Will The Gay Movement Become Tolerant?
Worth Reading
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An archive of current and past eNews for FBOs can be accessed HERE.

Briefing Video: Are Faith-Based Services Discriminatory? 

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Increasingly in our society, in the name of ensuring justice and dignity for all, governments are enforcing on professionals and service organizations a wide-ranging set of non-discrimination requirements dictating who must be hired, whom to serve, and how to serve those clients or patients.  The requirements are enforced through human rights codes, licensing regulations, public accommodations law, accreditation programs, strings on government grants and contracts, employment laws, and more.  

Some of the requirements conflict with the deep moral and religious convictions of many professionals and organizations of faith.  The doctor and the health clinic tend to the needs of the medically underserved--but won't perform abortions.  The adoption or foster-care agency is highly successful in recruiting families and in placing even children that are difficult to place-but works only with married mother-father families.  The charity works sacrificially and successfully with any ex-prisoner who comes to them, helping them rejoin the community--but requires its own staff to be faithful to a particular religion and its code of conduct.  

These faith-inspired professionals and organizations desire only to use their best faith-shaped expertise to help others.  And yet, because of what they won't do, because of their conviction, governments seek to charge them with discrimination and to forbid them from continuing to do all of the good that they undoubtedly do, by stripping away a license, banning them from government contracts or grants, or charging them with violation of a public accommodations or human rights or other law.  

Somehow in our nation we must figure out how we can better reconcile the legitimate freedom of people of faith to serve the public with the imperative of ensuring fair treatment for everyone who seeks help.  There must be a better way than by suppressing faith-based services.

Video of the briefing is available here:  http://vimeo.com/channels/freetoserve#31787719

The briefing featured three experts:

Marc Stern, Associate General Counsel for the American Jewish Committee, spoke about the many emerging clashes between religious freedom and requirements of non-discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and marital status.  Stern is the author of a path-breaking chapter on these clashes in Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty:  Emerging Conflicts, edited by D. Laycock, A. Picarello, Jr., and R. Fretwell Wilson (2008), where he discussed problem areas such as licensing, requirements attached to contracts, public-accommodation law, accreditation, professional standards, tax-exempt status, and more.

Stanley Carlson-Thies, President of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, stressed that faith-based organizations and not only individuals are being charged with being discriminatory, that the problematic requirements are often applied whether or not an organization accepts government funds, and that the conflicts involve differing genuine interests that require accommodation.  He proposed a way that Congress could act to protect the freedom of faith-based adoption and foster-care agencies to serve consistent with their convictions even as states end their prohibitions on adoption and fostering by gay persons and couples.  

Eric Scalise, Vice President for Professional Development at the American Association of Christian Counselors, spoke of emerging challenges to faith-based counselors.  Researchers in mental health are documenting the importance of working with the spiritual or religious commitments of clients, and yet the counseling profession regards religion to be a negative phenomenon that should be excluded.  Counselors are taught to refer to others clients that they cannot optimally serve, but may lose their professional standing if they refer a client who seeks help with a sexual relationship the counselor regards as inappropriate or harmful.  Scalise introduced a new interfaith initiative by his Association that is intended to help the profession and the public understand the importance of respecting the freedom of counselors to act consistent with their faith-shaped professional judgments.  

The discussion was moderated by Eric Kniffin, Legal Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

This is the fourth in a five-part series of briefings for congressional staff under the series title, "Free to Serve:  Safeguarding the Religious Freedom of Institutions and Professionals."  The final briefing, on Dec. 9th, is on protecting the religious mission of faith-based education.

All of the briefings are being videotaped by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.  Videos are posted on a special channel on vimeo.com: http://vimeo.com/channels/freetoserve  

Belmont Abbey College Sues to Stop Contraception Mandate
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Belmont Abbey College, a small Catholic college in North Carolina founded and governed by Benedictine monks, has sued the federal government so that it can avoid complying in 2012 with the recently decreed requirement that virtually all health insurance plans must cover without charge a wide range of "preventive services," including sterilization and contraceptives (including some that might be abortifacients).  The federal government offered only a very narrow exemption for religious employers.

The college is represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.  The Becket Fund stresses that Belmont Abbey desires to provide health insurance and doesn't object to most of the preventive services, but does, due to Catholic teaching, reject facilitating contraception, abortion, and sterilization.   And the college objects to the very narrow exemption, so narrowly drawn that only some specifically ecclesiastical institutions are exempt, but not Belmont Abbey or other religious colleges or most other faith-based service organizations.  And even if the college could fit the exemption, that would only allow it to refrain from paying for the objectionable procedures for its own employees; it would have to include the procedures in the health insurance it provides to students.  The Obama administration has issued thousands of health insurance waivers to companies and unions--but it has offered virtually no accommodation to the deep religious convictions of many faith-based organizations.

Hannah Smith, Senior Legal Counsel at the Becket Fund, says, "A monk at Belmont Abbey may preach on Sunday that pre-marital sex, contraception, and abortions are immoral, but on Monday, the government would force the same monk to pay for students to receive the very drugs and procedures he denounces.  This is much worse than an un-funded mandate; it is a monk-funded mandate."

For more on the case, go here.

For the IRFA-organized multi-faith letter protesting the narrow religious exemption, go here.
Charitable Donation Disincentive On the Way?
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Is reduction or elimination of the federal tax deduction for charitable giving inevitable as Congress and the Obama administration struggle (or fiddle) to reduce the huge gap between federal spending and federal income?  The President several times has proposed reducing the value of the deduction for wealthy taxpayers, and several of the plans floated by blue-ribbon commissions for a big fix to the federal fiscal imbalance took aim at the deduction.   

 

And last week a Washington Post report on the deliberations of the congressional "super committee" charged with forging a plan to steeply reduce the national debt says that Republicans have suggested, besides deep cuts, raising additional revenues by changing the tax code to "reduce tax rates for everyone but limit the value of itemized deductions, such as breaks for home mortgage interest and charitable contributions."  

No part of the federal government can be off limits in deciding how to make its operations sustainable and effective; even the best ideas from the past may turn out on current inspection to be flawed or simply unaffordable. And yet the deduction for charitable contributions isn't an ordinary "tax expenditure"; it isn't the same as every other government incentive designed to change taxpayer behavior.  

The incentive here is to prod taxpayers to give away more of their own money on behalf of others--to expand the private funds that underwrite initiatives that will help their needy neighbors and society in general.  With this incentive the government is helping to strengthen the non-governmental sector-civil society with its private religious and secular organizations that operate for the good of all as that "good" is understood in diverse ways by private persons and organizations.  The deduction is a small governmental incentive to build up alternatives to government.  

At the Senate Finance Committee hearing a month ago on the President's proposal to cap the value of the deduction, Russell Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary stressed that changing the charity deduction isn't a narrowly economic matter.  "Urging the senators not to change the charitable tax deduction, Moore said giving to charities 'teaches and shows that there are things more important than simply the abundance of our possessions.  We're not simply economic units.'"

That's a necessary reminder in this time of economic stress and as a counterweight to the fixation of the Washington policy debate on more spending or less, more taxes or less.

To follow the Washington debate about charitable giving incentives, keep in touch with the Alliance for Charitable Reform.  

S 598:  The (Dis)Respect for Marriage Act
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Senate bill S 598, proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and 30 co-sponsors, and its House counterpart, HR 1116, proposed by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and 132 co-sponsors, are both entitled the "Respect for Marriage" acts.  The bills purport to strengthen society's respect for marriage by repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  DOMA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, after passing the Senate 85-14 and the House 342-67.  DOMA affirms that for federal purposes marriage consists of one man married to one woman and it provides that no state need treat as valid a same-sex marriage from another state.

In place of those provisions, the proposed Respect for Marriage Act would require the federal government to treat any valid same-sex marriage as being equivalent to a man-woman marriage.

Agudath Israel of America, a national orthodox Jewish organization, recently wrote to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, expressing the organization's objection to the proposed replacement for DOMA.  The letter points out that DOMA establishes one uniform definition of marriage for federal purposes--for government action that, unlike state-government action, has to be valid in every state.  DOMA's standard (one-man, one-woman marriage) "does not go beyond the standard currently recognized in every state."  Some states recognize additional marriages but none reject traditional marriage.  But if the Respect for Marriage Act became the law, then the federal government would recognize as marriages unions that most states do not consider to be marriage at all.

The letter also points out that these bills do not include any religious freedom protection at all.  States that have legislatively redefined marriage generally have included at least some protection for religious organizations with a religious objection to helping to celebrate same-sex marriages.  Without any such language, the federal government might decide it cannot support faith-based organizations that object to marriage redefinition--for example, excluding them from grants and contracts or stripping their tax-exempt status.

The Agudath Israel letter ends with this reminder of the larger significance of the debates over marriage redefinition:

"Many are using the issue as a means of disparaging religious communities and beliefs, and as an avenue for changing our society's perception of homosexual behavior.  This was most shockingly demonstrated several months ago by Attorney General Eric Holder when he criticized the 'moral disapproval' of homosexuality and labeled the religious values, ethical imperatives and historical traditions of millions of Americans as 'animus.'  These sentiments clearly belie the claim that this matter is simply one of 'fairness and 'equality' and can only result in greater divisiveness and hostility."
Dolan's Decree:  Archdiocese of New York Policy on Same-Sex Marriage
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In July, New York adopted a law redefining marriage to include same-sex marriages.  The law has an exemption for religious organizations, though its protection is narrow and not entirely clear.  

To provide guidance for Catholic persons and organizations in the Archdiocese of New York, Archbishop Timothy Dolan recently issued a policy statement.  The decree says  that no Catholic clergy nor Catholic Church employee may take part in the solemnization or celebration of a same-sex marriage, including by "providing services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges" for such ceremonies or celebrations.  Further, no Catholic facility or property, such as a meeting hall or space in a Catholic charitable organization or school, and no item set aside for Catholic worship, may be used to celebrate or solemnize a same-sex wedding.

However, the decree does not say what a New York Catholic institution can or must do with regard to treating a same-sex marriage as being a valid marriage--for example, whether a Catholic adoption agency should consider a same-sex couple to be the same as a man-woman married couple, or whether, in providing spousal benefits, a Catholic institution should use the state's new definition of married spouse.
Jonathan Rauch Asks:  Will The Gay Movement Become Tolerant?
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Jonathan Rauch is author of the 2004 book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.  In short, he favors gay marriage and, in general, the eradication of all discrimination against, and societal disapproval of, people who identify themselves as gay.  

Yet, he says, the gay rights movement should give up its absolutist drive to demand acceptance from everyone.  Instead, it should "accept legal exceptions that let religious organizations discriminate against gays whenever their doing so imposes a cost we can live with."  And the gay rights movement should "dial back the accusations of 'bigot' and 'hater.'"  

Why?  Read his essay, "Majority Report," from The Advocate (December 2010), here.
Worth Reading
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Howard Husock, "The Solyndra-ization of Philanthropy," The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2011.

"The White House wants to steer your charitable giving to pet causes. . . . [T]ethering private philanthropy to government in this way clearly risks--or even guarantees--that promising new ideas will be overlooked in favor of politically fashionable (or partisan) ones. Even more broadly, though, government-directed giving could shut down an historically important social safety valve through which those with dissenting views about the best ways to ameliorate social problems can act on them."
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What is IRFA?

The Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance works to safeguard the religious identity, faith-based standards and practices, and faith-shaped services of faith-based organizations across the range of service sectors and religions, enabling them to make their distinctive and best contributions to the common good.