Not Only Catholics Oppose the Contraception Mandate

E.J. Dionne gets it wrong in his Washington Post column entitled "Obama's challenge with Catholics and health care" that discusses the fierce controversy about the administration's contraception mandate for health insurance plans. That mandate requires free coverage of a broad sweep of "preventive services," including contraceptives that are abortifacients. The Washington Post's reporter gets it wrong, too, in reporting on the pressure by Democratic members of Congress and activist groups to keep the administration from expanding the currently laughable exemption to that mandate. The New York Times gets it wrong in its article on the controversy. And the First Things comment, "Will Evangelicals Stand Up for Religious Liberty?," shows insufficient research in supposing that only Catholic leaders have spoken up about this vital matter.

All say that the opposition to the mandate and to the narrow exemption is coming just from Catholic organizations and spokespersons. Given the Catholic Church's prominent and long-standing stance against artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion, it is no surprise that much of the opposition has come from Catholic sources.

Yet not only Catholics are deeply concerned about the contraception mandate and the very minimal exemption for (only some!) "religious employers."

Here's what the (Protestant) Council for Christian Colleges and Universities said in its submission to the administration about the concerns of its "137 member and affiliate schools that comprise the U.S. constituency" of its membership. The requirement to cover "'preventative services,' some of which are abortifacients, will force most if not all of our institutions to violate their religious consciences." If there was an adequate exemption for religious organizations, the conscience problem would be mitigated, but the current exemption is "extremely anemic" and it is "at best uncertain" whether CCCU institutions fit its narrow confines, "[d]espite their unmistakable religious character and their profound commitment to their religious mission." Moreover, even if the schools themselves would be exempted, the health plans they offer their students are not exempt. "Many of our schools object on religious grounds to being required to offer emergency contraceptives to their students, as it undermines the behavior code and violates the convictions of the schools' supportive community of faith. . . . It would mean that the school is required by the federal government to offer services to students that the school teaches are wrongful services."

And 44 leaders of faith-based organizations--almost all of them Protestant or orthodox Jewish--signed an August 26th letter to Joshua DuBois, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, asking his office to "vigorously advocate on behalf of faith-based organizations and against this inaccurately narrow and practically inadequate definition of 'religious employer.'" They wrote that the organizations and religious traditions they represent "do not all share the same convictions about the moral acceptability of the mandated services. However, we do agree that the definition of religious employer that has been adopted is so narrow that it excludes a great many actual 'religious employers' and probably most faith-based organizations that serve people in need . . . ."

The letter stresses how utterly inadequate the religious employer exemption is. If the regulation is kept as is, a large proportion of faith-based service organizations in the United States will have been categorized by the federal government as "secular organizations. This is a dangerous and damaging Federal policy."

For a flagship federal program to treat many or most authentically religious organizations as not being real "religious employers" because their purpose is broader than the "inculcation of religious values," they employ some or many people of a different or no faith, and they do not limit their services to people of the same faith would be a huge mistake and a betrayal of the religious freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. You don't have to be Catholic, or even religious, to see that.

Pro and Anti Religious Freedom Groups Proliferate in Washington
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The Pew Forum recently released a report, Lobbying for the Faithful: Religious Advocacy Groups in Washington, DC. The report identifies 212 groups of diverse issue concerns, faiths, and sizes. The groups collectively spend at least $390 million annually to influence national policy while working on some 300 different policy issues, ranging from church-state questions and religious persecution to climate change, fighting poverty, and increasing interfaith cooperation. The Pew Forum's website includes an online directory of the 212 groups.

Those 200+ groups represent a five-fold growth in religious advocacy organizations in Washington DC since 1970, the report says. And $390 million plus per year in advocacy efforts is a significant amount of money. Too many groups, too much money, some say. "Religious lobbyists used to be like subsistence farmers, and now it's like agribusiness," according to the Rev. Barry Lynn, head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. But his group is part of the "agribusiness"--AU is listed as the 15th largest spender: $6.3 million on advocacy in 2008. Additional groups that one might also characterize as more interested in limiting than expanding religious freedom are also included in the big figures for the number of groups and the expense of their advocacy work--the American Humanist Association, the Human Rights Campaign, People for the American Way, and the Secular Coalition for America, for instance.

Why so many groups and so much money? The brief historical section of the report gives several important reasons: "a general rise in public religious expression, both domestically and globally," the trend in America of institutionalizing political activism, and the growing religious diversity of America--more faiths, more Washington groups. And especially this: "The growing reach of the federal government in economic, environmental and social policy also acted as a magnet, drawing religious groups to the nation's capital."

But magnet is not the only image to have in mind. Think also of an enormous fine-meshed fishing net cast over ever more organizations and activities of society as the federal government regulates and pays for more and more of the things that faith-based organizations care about. And think of a shield: often the work of religious freedom advocacy in Washington is an effort to protect religion from government--to preserve space for religious differences as the government expands its uniform rules over more and more of our lives.

Keeping these additional images in mind, those big numbers of groups and expenditures should be seen less as indicators of growing religious influence and more as signs of government's expanding reach and secularizing impact.

Looking to Dictatorships For Ways to Keep Religious Groups Alive in America!
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It's a shocking story in the Dec. 3 issue of World magazine. The article is about the new policy at Vanderbilt University that "prohibits student organizations from holding members or leaders to any standard of belief or behavior." This requirement to have no belief or conduct requirements even for leaders has been troubling especially to four Christian campus groups, the Beta Upsilon Chi fraternity, Graduate Christian Fellowship (InterVarsity), the Christian Legal Society, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

The article notes the legal background, in particular the 2010 US Supreme Court decision in CLS v. Martinez, which upheld a California public law school's requirement that all recognized campus groups must accept "all comers," whether or not they agree with an organization's mission, and a more-recent federal appeal's court decision that the California State University system could enforce on student groups, including religious groups, a requirement that they not "discriminate" on religious and other grounds.

But how can a religious or ideological group even keep going if it must leave itself open to being taken over by members and leadership candidates who might actually be committed to the very opposite of the group's convictions?

To gain insight into how to exist when the government enforces such crazy requirements, the article says, staffers for InterVarsity last summer attended a conference in Poland for evangelical student groups. Why? They went to "gather[] information about ministry strategies from groups in countries that prohibit Christian organizations from meeting on college campuses."

In short, to learn how to maintain their ministries on American college campuses, these representatives of a Christian student organization decided they had to learn from Christian organizations that exist in countries that suppress religious freedom.

Simply stunning.

New York Attorney General Aims to Protect (Some?) Religious Rights

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The office of New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman recently announced the "Religious Rights Initiative," a project of his office's Civil Rights Bureau. The initiative is intended to "protect religious freedom, foster and promote tolerance," "target faith-based discrimination," and "enforce anti-discrimination laws."

There will be a public education campaign to inform religious communities and the public "about the requirements of the state's anti-discrimination laws." A set of "Know Your Rights" publications will help to "prevent religious discrimination in a variety of settings and circumstances."

These are good intentions and goals, important initiatives in a state that is increasingly diverse religiously and in an era in which commercial pressures and secular inclinations can easily lead businesses and other institutions to run roughshod over the religious freedom of employees and customers.

But will the Attorney General be equally energetic in protecting the legitimate rights of
religious organizations themselves? Such organizations--not only houses of worship but also a large array of faith-based schools, adoption agencies, drug-treatment programs, homeless shelters, and so much more--are one of the main ways that individuals put their religious convictions into practice in society. But if religious discrimination and religious rights are understood only in individualistic terms, then religious organizations will be undermined. For example, a religious student group can hardly flourish if it is not able to "discriminate" by insisting that its leaders must be committed to its mission. (See the story above!)

The Attorney General has released one publication already, Religious Rights in the Workplace. It carefully explains anti-discrimination and anti-harassment rights and the requirement under state and federal law that employers must "reasonably accommodate" the religious exercise of their employees, such as their need to worship on a particular day of the week (unless accommodating the employees' beliefs will create an "undue hardship" for the employer). Alas, nothing in the brochure explains that, under state and federal law, the rules are different for religious employers who may, for example, normally take account of job applicants' religion when deciding whether they will be a suitable addition to the workplace.

This is not a promising start.

A Federal Child Care Program is the Next Big Push?

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It popped up in the "Style" section of the Washington Post: a long profile of Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Minority Leader of the House. Early in the story was this nugget: If, "or when, according to her," the Democrats regain control of the House, "at the top of her to-do list . . . will be 'doing for child care what we did for health-care reform'--pushing comprehensive change." Her spokesman later said that Pelosi did not have any specific proposal in mind, but confirmed that universal access to affordable, high-quality child is "the next big problem" Pelosi thinks the federal government must tackle.

Leave aside for the moment the inability of the federal government to get its own finances in order, let alone figure out how to play a more constructive role in our prolonged and deep recession. Leave aside all the questions that must pop up when contemplating any massive new federal entitlement program. Focus for a moment on the church-state aspect of deeper federal involvement in paying for and regulating child care.

The last time Congress paid extended attention to child care was in the late 1980s. One side wanted the federal government to make more quality care available to poorer families by contracting with child care centers. Yet with such "direct" government funding, all religious elements would have to be kept out of the child care services. The thousands of faith-based child care programs would be excluded, leaving many parents without the choice they desired. The other side advocated just less government spending and lower taxes--let families pick their own centers in the marketplace, or decide that one of the spouses should provide the care on her own. That was no real solution for poor families.

So in crafting the Child Care and Development Block Grant, signed into law in 1990, Congress decided to encourage states--which would administer the federal child-care funds--to award the child care money to parents, in the form of vouchers or certificates, instead of to child-care centers, in the form of contracts. Because parents, and not state officials, would choose where children would be cared for and thus which centers would get the government funds, then the centers could have a religious identity and a faith-shaped program of care. Thanks to this "indirect" form of funding, faith-based centers could take part, notwithstanding the new federal money, enabling parents to stick with child-care providers they trusted.

Should Congress even dream about a bigger role in funding child care services? If it does choose to go this way, at the very least it ought to build on the existing program, with its preference for child-care vouchers, parental control, and religious freedom for faith-based centers.

Additional information: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/occ/providers/faithbased.htm#1

Fifth Hill Briefing: Keeping the Faith in Faith-Based Education

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The fifth and last briefing for congressional staffers on institutional religious freedom trends will focus on faith-based schools, colleges, and universities. An expert panel will discuss topics such as the requirement in the Higher Education Act that accreditation agencies must respect the religious mission of faith-based higher education institutions, and the fight to ensure that extra federal funds for Title I special education that were allocated by the stimulus bill could be used by students in private and parochial schools and not just those in public schools.

Friday, Dec. 9, noon to 1:15 pm, H-137 (Capitol Building). A light lunch will be served.

Worth Reading
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The Winter 2011 issue of Policy in Public from the Canadian Christian think tank Cardus is devoted to the new Office of Religious Freedom in the Canadian foreign affairs department.

Stanley Carlson-Thies, "God-honouring Public Service in an Ungodly Government," Comment on-line (Cardus), Nov. 7, 2011.

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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.