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Candidates Note Institutional Religious Freedom Issues
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To the extent that press reports on last Saturday's New Hampshire Republican primary debate have mentioned religion and morality, most of the attention has gone to comments from Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum about birth control and the US Supreme Court's "discovery" of a right of privacy that protects abortions, and to the moderators' pressing of questions about gay couples who want to marry.  

But several of the candidates made it a point to note the increasing pressures on the faith-based practices of religious organizations as a consequence of the push for same-sex marriage, for abortion rights, and for the prohibition of sexual-orientation discrimination.  Note these statements from the debate transcript.

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Newt Gingrich: I just want to raise -- since we've spent this much time on these issues -- I just want to raise a point about the news media bias. You don't hear the opposite question asked. Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won't accept gay couples, which is exactly what the state has done? Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won't give in to secular bigotry? Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?
The bigotry question goes both ways. And there's a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. And none of it gets covered by the news media.


Mitt Romney: As you can tell, the people in this room feel that Speaker Gingrich is absolutely right and I do too. And -- and I was in a state where the Supreme Court stepped in and said, marriage is a relationship required under the Constitution for -- for people of the same sex to be able to marry. And John Adams, who wrote the Constitution, would be surprised.
And -- and it did exactly as Speaker Gingrich indicated, what happened was Catholic charities that placed almost half of all of the adoptive children in our state, was forced to step out of being able to provide adoptive services. And the state tried to find other places to help children that we -- we have to recognize that -- that this decision about what we call marriage, has consequence which goes far beyond a loving couple wanting to form a long-term relationship.
That they can do within the law now. Calling it a marriage, creates a whole host of problems for -- for families, for the law, for -- for -- for the practice of -- of religion, for education. Let me -- let me say this, 3,000 years of human history shouldn't be discarded so quickly.


Rick Perry: [T]his administration's war on religion is what bothers me greatly. When we see an administration that will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act, that gives their Justice Department clear instructions to go take the ministerial exception away from our churches where that's never happened before. When we see this administration not giving money to Catholic charities for sexually trafficked individuals because they don't agree with the Catholic church on abortion, that is a war against religion. And it's going to stop under a Perry administration.
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One need not believe that the current administration, or government generally, is waging determined war against religion to recognize that governmental rules more and more are narrowing the freedom of religious individuals and institutions to use their own best judgment about how to act.  And, given that reality, it is a sign of hope that candidates in the heat of a very public primary debate are willing to stand up for religious freedom.

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Here's how the New York Times story by Laurie Goodstein begins:  "Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state's social service network for poor and neglected children."  

You might think that Illinois state officials have been doing everything they possibly can to retain this important resource for children and families in crisis.  Apparently not.  The Times article ends with this quote from Kendall Marlowe, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services: "The child welfare system that Catholic Charities helped build is now strong enough to survive their departure."  So much for them.

It is worth noting that the Catholic Charities agencies and the Evangelical Child and Family Agency were not stripped of their long-standing foster-care contracts with the state last year because of any change in their own policies.  Rather, once the wildly mis-named "Illinois Religious Freedom and Civil Union Act" came into effect last June 1, the state and various activist groups decided that those faith-based agencies' long-standing practices now should be redefined to constitute intolerable, intolerant, and illegal discrimination.

What were those evil policies?  ECFA notes that it started its foster-care services before the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services even existed.  When the DCFS was created in 1965, the new department "asked us to take abused, neglected, and abandoned children into our care. We were happy to assist the State Department by placing these children into evangelical Christian homes. ECFA continued to contract with DCFS on an annual basis for the following 46 years with the understanding that we would be allowed to recruit married and single evangelical parents for our foster care program while referring non-evangelical individuals to other agencies."  It's that policy of specializing in serving some families and individuals and referring others to other agencies or to the state that now has been deemed intolerable.

Catholic Charities encountered the same problem.  The Times article notes that, when pressed by the state to disregard its moral convictions about marriage in its future foster care decisions, the Catholic Charities agencies "offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples"--"but that was not acceptable to the state."

So much for the pioneering service of these faith-based agencies!

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In 2011, 80 percent of the $20 million the Department of Homeland Security's Nonprofit Security Grant Program awarded went to Jewish synagogues, community centers, senior centers, schools, and office buildings.  Critics have alleged  church-state problems with all this money flowing to Jewish institutions, including houses of worship.  

And yet the funds are specifically intended to improve the security of organizations likely to be the target of terrorist attack--surely Jewish organizations fit that description.  And surely the government's duty to protect the safety of every citizen doesn't disappear when some of those citizens assemble in a worship structure.  

The separation of church and state is an important constitutional value, keeping the government from improper interference in the inner life of religious institutions, and preventing religious institutions from exercising inappropriate control over political decisions.  Awarding security grants to uniquely vulnerable religious institutions is no violation of this First Amendment principle!

420 Days and Counting
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On November 17, 2010, President Obama issued Executive Order 13559, "Fundamental Principles and Policymaking Criteria for Partnerships With Faith-Based and Other Neighborhood Organizations."  In this important statement of his administration's understanding of the First Amendment's guidelines on religion, the President for the most part adopted as his own the principles that President Bush had promulgated in his own Executive Order 13279, while making some refinements and changes.

Because of those modifications--in particular, an effort to more accurately describe what kinds of religious activities and religious expression must be kept entirely separate from programs funded directly by the government, and the creation of a new right in all programs for a client to ask for an alternative to a faith-based service provider--President Obama's Executive Order created a high-level Working Group to assess federal regulations and practices and to recommend changes where needed.  The Working Group was to report to the President within 120 days.

It is now four hundred and twenty days after the appearance of President Obama's Executive Order.  No Working Group report has yet been made.  That's not all bad--the existing regulations and practices are broadly constitutional and workable.  Still, improvements can be made and the President's recommended changes have merit.  More than that, because the administration launched a formal process of assessment and change, officials and private organizations have been left in suspense, unsure just what might change.  Important work ought not to be done hastily.  Still, 420 days is far more than 120 days.  It's time for that Working Group report!

Noteworthy Quotes
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"Douglas Laycock, a constitutional lawyer who argues cases on behalf of religious groups, said he doesn't think the administration is hostile to religion. He says the administration takes the issues case by case.

"'I think they've aggressively protected religious liberty in some issues and failed to protect it in other issues,' Laycock says. 'But they're not hostile. The hostility is in parts of the political culture--particularly in the gay rights movement and the pro-choice movement.'   . . .

"What's happened in the past decade, Laycock says, is that the culture wars have become a zero sum game. When one side wins, the other loses.

"'The conservative religious groups want to take away all the liberty of the pro-choice and gay-rights people, and the pro-choice and gay-rights people want to take away all the liberty of the conservative religious groups,' he says. 'Neither side seems interested in the American tradition of 'live and let live' and protect the liberty of both sides.'

"And Laycock sees little chance of a detente, particularly in an election year."

--Barbara Bradley Hagerty, "Has Obama Waged A War on Religion?" NPR, Jan. 8, 2012.   

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