eNews for Faith-Based Organizations
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Please click on the "Read More" links at the end of the excerpts to read the full articles on the IRFA website and to browse other news and resources; or look for the full articles at the end of the email.
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FBOs: fighting poverty or the culture war?
(by Stanley Carlson-Thies)
A mid-May, 2015, Catholic-evangelical summit brought together President Obama, academic experts, and faith leaders to consider how to more effectively address persistent poverty. Was this a u-turn from the churches' focus on pro-life and marriage crusades?
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Recognition of SSM in federal marriage and fatherhood programs
(by Stanley Carlson-Thies)
In May, 2015, renewed federal funding for marriage-strengthening and for fatherhood-promoting programs was announced. The rules try to accommodate both traditional and progressive views, but raise serious questions.
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Care is vital in RFRA wordsmithing and advocacy
(by Chelsea Langston)
In May, 2015, additional states are considering legislation to protect the exercise of individual and organizational religious freedom-state RFRAs and similar bills. Given how controversial such efforts have been in states like Indiana and Arkansas, it is imperative that state lawmakers be judicious with the wording of such proposed laws and in the way they express the spirit and purpose of the laws to the public.
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SOGI bills and religious freedom - shared marginalization can spur accommodation
(by Chelsea Langston)
In mid-May, 2015, the Nebraska legislature tabled a workplace nondiscrimination bill to add sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to the list of protected classes, in part because the religious freedom protections were uncertain. States and cities need to protect religious freedom when advancing other rights--and faith-based organizations need to be engaged so that this will happen.
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Full Text of All Articles
FBOs: Fighting poverty or the culture war?
(by Stanley Carlson-Thies)
A mid-May, 2015, Catholic-evangelical summit brought together President Obama, academic experts, and faith leaders to consider how to more effectively address persistent poverty. Was this a u-turn from the churches' focus on pro-life and marriage crusades? The Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty, at Georgetown University, co-sponsored by Georgetown's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life and the National Association of Evangelicals, was an important and thoughtful event which may serve to help bridge the fruitless polarities that continue to hamper our society's understanding of and response to deep poverty: family life or economic change, individual responsibility or government funding, charity or public services. Faith-based organizations, which directly serve the needy and also often partner with government, and which commonly work in a holistic way and in collaboration with other community groups, are themselves bridges between the different factors and solutions that need to be brought together. The Summit brought welcome new attention to that community-serving role of faith-based organizations, which has sometimes been overshadowed in the public mind by the strong religious voices pushing for pro-life laws and by loud advocacy to maintain traditional marriage in the face of growing public approval of marriage equality. Without a doubt, some of that pro-life and marriage advocacy has had a culture war quality: a fight to keep "our values" dominant over "your values."
Casting this as an either-or matter isn't very illuminating, though. Some of America's major religious communities will point out that strong marriages do have positive economic consequences; children parented by both a mother and a father, on balance, have a head start; and foundational to helping a person flourish is protecting their existence before birth.
Those views may be increasingly unpopular-and that, in fact, is another reason why many faith-based organizations have decided they have to speak up about some controversial social issues even though their actual main focus is serving community needs. Theirs is a defensive voice, a plea for the freedom to retain their deeply rooted convictions about society and marriage and life, as unpopular as these may be, because they are integral to the organizations' whole ethos of service, their set of convictions that propels them into service.
After all, these aren't just humanitarian organizations with a general ethic of doing good; no, they are specifically religious organizations, motivated and shaped by specific religious commitments that drive them to serve in particular ways. Their faith calls them to be ingenious in collecting private funding whether or not there is government funding. Their faith calls them to serve everyone without regard to religion, despite the common human tendency to tribalism. Their faith calls them to pioneer new services when society in general either has not noticed a need or has lacked confidence that solutions are possible.
Faith is their motor, and their varied religious convictions guide their operations and shape their services. Those convictions can put them at odds with legislated or court-ordered requirements based on secular norms and imposed without adequate accommodations for religious differences. It is just such legislation and court rulings that have alarmed many faith-based organizations and compelled them to turn to defensive advocacy and to litigation to protect their freedom to remain true to the deep convictions that motivate and shape their service to the world. Catholic hospitals have to advocate and litigate if they are to remain free to follow their pro-life convictions. Catholic and evangelical adoption agencies have had to advocate and litigate to try to protect their freedom to make their faith-shaped decisions about the best interests of children. Religious organizations of many kinds have turned to advocacy and litigation to seek to preserve the ability to offer employee health benefits that correspond, rather than conflicting, with their religious convictions. Organizations from many faiths have joined together to protect their freedom to consider religious faithfulness when selecting staff.
The dilemma, not yet resolved by these faith-based organizations, is how to keep the public focus on the community good they accomplish daily even as they, when necessary, speak out to protect their freedom to remain true to those other central convictions that have now become unpopular.
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Recognition of SSM in federal marriage and fatherhood programs
(by Stanley Carlson-Thies)
Federal funding of fatherhood and marriage programs go back quite a few years, as Congress realized that entrenched poverty and other social problems are connected with unraveling families and marriages. Dealing with these complex matters has become even more difficult as views of parenting and marriage have become more diverse.
Ever since the US Supreme Court, in its Windsor decision in June 2013, struck down the federal definition of marriage as one man-one woman, the federal government has been revising its internal policies and the rules that apply to federal grants when those policies and rules deal with "marriage," "spouses," "dependents, "families," and the like.
With grants, the changes have often been commonsensical: if to determine eligibility for a service the grantee has to count both the applicant's income and the income of the applicant's "spouse," now the income of both same-sex and opposite-sex married partners has to be taken into account.
But what about grant programs where marriage or family is at the very center of the services to be offered? How will grantees in these programs deal with new definitions of family, marriage, and spouse-and how will new rules accommodate the diverse views grantees and our society has about these important matters?
The new round of marriage and fatherhood programs propose one way to deal with the new realities, but it is not entirely satisfactory.
The application information for the Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Grants does not specify any particular definition of marriage, and the marriage curricula that are listed, though not required, do not crusade for marriage equality. However, grantees are required to abide by the following nondiscrimination requirement:
"In providing services to eligible persons, grantees may not discriminate on the basis of the potential participant's race, gender, age, disability, or religion. Grantees cannot, on the basis of race, gender, age, disability, or religion, discriminate in determining eligibility, benefits, or services provided, or applicable rules."
Thus, it appears that one organization might successfully apply for funding to provide marriage and relationship education from the perspective of traditional marriage while another might successfully apply to teach these topics and skills from the perspective of same-sex marriage. And then the programs of both grantees will have to be open to and provide help to whomever shows up, whichever couples arrive and enroll in the courses.
So far, so good. But what happens when the opposite-sex engaged couple finds it puzzling and even unhelpful that the same-sex marriage curriculum never even mentions the specific dynamics of intimate male-female relationships? What happens when the same-sex couple finds it puzzling and even offensive that the traditional marriage curriculum is always talking about husband-wife relations? Remember: the respective curricula have been accepted by the federal authorities.
If the opposite-sex couple complains, will the federal government pressure the same-sex grantee to adjust its curricula and retrain its staff-or recommend that the couple find another course? What will happen if the same-sex couple complains in the other program?
The application materials are just silent. And yet surely applicants for the grants will want to know whether, in predictable disputes like these, the federal government will stand behind them rather than charging them with illegal discrimination.
The New Pathways for Fathers and Families grant materials include a similar dilemma or concern.
The grant program acknowledges the importance of engaging specifically biological fathers and also father figures ("e.g., grandfathers, foster fathers") in the lives of children. Fatherhood curricula that are really about fatherhood are acceptable. And yet there is the same nondiscrimination requirement as in the marriage grants, forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender (etc.). And also this specific additional requirement: "The projects and activities assisted under these awards must be available to mothers and expectant mothers who are able to benefit from the activities on the same basis as fathers and expectant fathers."
So the grantees will freely emphasize how important fathers, specifically, are in the lives of children-their children and other children with whom they have or can have a connection. And in the audience there may well be: mothers-mothers who want to better engage as mothers with their children, perhaps some mothers who find it annoying or even offensive that the federal government is spending all this money to promote fatherhood . . . When there are complaints, what will federal officials say and do?
At the very least, the federal government ought to specifically state that participants in marriage and fatherhood programs have no right to object to the curricula of those programs. And it should specifically state that all efforts, including social media campaigns, to pressure grantees to modify their curricula are unacceptable. Charges of discrimination will just be dismissed.
Concern about what specifically can be taught in federally supported programs like these is hardly trivial. Legal equality notwithstanding, there is a serious question about the substantive equivalence of same-sex and opposite-sex marriage. Fatherhood and motherhood can be equally valued without assuming that there are essentially simply two names for generic parenting. In fact, major religious traditions have millennial-old convictions about such matters. By ensuring that federally funded programs are not required to wash out these important differences the government both protects religious freedom and honors the diversity of convictions in our society-better serving the diverse public.
In fact, rather than the uneasy compromise reflected in these announcements, the federal government could go an important step further, converting these grant programs to voucherized funding and then specifically solicit and make available a variety of marriage and parenting programs.
Care is vital in RFRA wordsmithing and advocacy (by Chelsea Langston) In May, 2015, additional states are considering legislation to protect the exercise of individual and organizational religious freedom-state RFRAs and similar bills. Given how controversial such efforts have been in states like Indiana and Arkansas, it is imperative that state lawmakers be judicious with the wording of such proposed laws and in the way they express the spirit and purpose of the laws to the public.
Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993 in response to the Supreme Court's ruling in the Smith case. In Smith, the Court said that, because a law about illegal drugs was general and not targeted to harm religion, it could be applied against a Native American man who claimed that he smoked peyote, an illegal drug, as part of a religious ceremony. Congress considered that such an interpretation of religious freedom was inadequate and adopted RFRA as a remedy. RFRA says that if a generally applicable law substantially burdens a person's sincere exercise of their religion, the law can only be applied if the government can prove it has a compelling interest for the burden and there is no less burdensome way to protect that interest. Four years later, in City of Boerne v. Flores, the Supreme Court ruled RFRA applies only to the federal government and not to the states. In response, many states have adopted their own state RFRAs or have amended their constitutions to reflect the RFRA principles.
In 2015, multiple states have considered legislation based, closely or loosely, on RFRA. RFRA bills have become controversial, in part because the federal RFRA protected Hobby Lobby's religious claim not to include certain birth control methods in its health plan and in part because of the perception that state RFRAs might be used by religious business owners to protect a refusal to serve gay customers. In truth, despite the fears of RFRA opponents and the hopes of (some) RFRA supporters, the courts have never interpreted RFRA to justify rank discrimination, such as a restaurant turning away a gay couple. Whether or not a court might rule that a state RFRA law will protect a religious small business from assisting with a gay wedding, if the business owners have a sincere religious belief that marriage is a religious ceremony restricted to opposite-sex couples, is up in the air.
It is essential for state lawmakers, religious groups, and citizens to closely monitor the exact language of any proposed law modeled after RFRA. As the Baptist Joint Committee's Executive Director Brent Walker states: "federal RFRA embodies a delicately balanced formula by which courts can adjudicate religious liberty claims while seeking to protect important interests of society generally or the well-being of third parties adversely affected by the requested accommodation." States considering passage of a RFRA would do well to keep their language as close as possible to the federal statute, both because the federal statute has done a pretty successful job at upholding religious exercise in the past 20 years and because following precedent helps to insulate a bill from outlandish charges.
Issues with state RFRAs arise when, as Walker aptly puts it, "proponents of state legislation want to change the language of their bills to promote their own policy agendas or to disadvantage that of their political opponents." This happens when states adopt RFRA-like language that actually throws off the equilibrium of the balancing test. For example, some states have taken "substantial" out of the requirement that a claimant prove that a generally applicable law is a "substantial burden" on their religious exercise. This is problematic because it not only tilts the rights pendulum too far on the plaintiff's religious freedom side, it inevitable produces suspicion at best and vitriol at worst from opponents.
With bills currently before many state legislatures, the other key that state lawmakers and governors must keep in mind is rhetoric and public perception. Proponents of state RFRAs must, because of situations like Indiana, overcompensate in developing clear messaging with tangible examples about HOW RFRA works to protect minority beliefs and minority religious practices, WHY it does not provide a general license to discriminate, and WHAT its relation is to sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination laws. State RFRAs play an important role in protecting religious actors from state and local laws that could harm their ability to practice their faith. But if policymakers are not careful with the language of religious freedom statutes and the messaging attached to such laws, they run the very real risk that they will create more problems than they solve and further sour public opinion against necessary accommodations for religious exercise.
So what kind of messaging works? Advocates of state RFRAs should take a page from Douglas Laycock's playbook. Professor Laycock is a supporter of same-sex marriage and a staunch advocate of religious liberty. In an interview responding to Indiana's RFRA, Laycock emphasized the importance of tolerance. "It is meaningless to say that you support religious liberty only so long as the religious practice isn't anything you seriously disagree with. . . Just as we protect the freedom to say things we disagree with, we have to protect the liberty of religions we disagree with." This is exactly what state RFRAs, and similar laws, aim to do. Although some bills come up short or have struck the wrong balance, these laws are, at their core, a mechanism for providing religious actors with a chance to be heard in court and have their rights and interests weighed against the interests of the state.
Resource for tracking state RFRAs: Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty State RFRA Bill Tracker
SOGI Bills and Religious Freedom - shared marginalization can spur accommodation
(by Chelsea Langston)
In mid-May, 2015, the Nebraska legislature tabled a workplace nondiscrimination bill to add sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to the list of protected classes, in part because the religious freedom protections were uncertain. States and cities need to protect religious freedom when advancing other rights-and faith-based organizations need to be engaged so that this will happen. An amendment to the bill aimed at providing a modicum of religious freedom protections fell short and produced a heated debate about who would actually receive accommodations. As states and municipalities around the country consider, and ultimately pass, versions of SOGI laws, it is essential that faith based organizations enter the dialogue to craft language that will protect their rights to continue to operate according to their principles. On May 14th, Nebraska's legislature made passage unlikely of Lincoln Senator Adam Morfeld's Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) nondiscrimination bill after a heated debate over adding religious freedom protections did not result in agreement about changes to the bill. Senator Morfeld said he would table Bill LB586 for the rest of the session, preserving it for next year. The Journal Star reported: "A similar bill fell to a filibuster last year, yet supporters had gained hope this go-around, thanks to backing from the business community, especially in the state's two largest cities." While the bill's intention to protect gay and transgender individuals from facing discrimination in the workplace is positive, the proposed legislation struck many complex and heated chords with Nebraska lawmakers and much of the public. Many faith-based organizations and individuals have serious concerns about categorizing sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in civil rights law. Some believe it is problematic to treat complex, personal, sexual identities and attractions as essentially the same as immutable characteristics such as race, national identity, and ethnicity. In many faith traditions, sexual orientation and gender identity raise questions of nature and nurture, as well as the issue of an individual's choice to act on such identities or attractions. Others, to be sure, just find such protections unnecessary and question whether gay and transgender individuals are in such a vulnerable place in the job market and economy that they need particular legal protection. Proponents of such SOGI laws should acknowledge that religions generally have, throughout history, aligned their doctrines with traditional conservative sexual ethics and lifestyles. Supporters and objectors to proposed legislation such as Nebraska's nondiscrimination bill can agree that these bills evoke strong feelings on both sides that arise from strong desires to protect the ability of individuals to live the lives they feel compelled to live. Even Senator Morfeld recognized the challenges of his bill after three hours of debate, stating: "We are at a point where we need to go back to the drawing board a little bit." How should faith communities respond when bills like these are proposed? Some faith leaders resist entering into a discussion at all of how to incorporate ample accommodations for religious conscience into SOGI laws for fear that such protections would actually help SOGI laws pass, given their concerns about treating SOGI issues the same as race and ethnicity Yet it is clear that legislators and the public less and less share their concerns about expanding legal protections. It is a likely prospect in most states and in many major cities that, If not this year, then next year a SOGI bill will win a majority. If religious individuals and institutions are to be free to continue to operate according to their sincerely held religious beliefs in areas such as hiring, it is essential they speak up now to create robust protections for their freedom to live out their faith in their organizations. Saying "no" carte blanche to the concept of SOGI laws will not stop such laws from going forward in the long-term. It may stall such proposed laws temporarily, but ultimately, SOGI laws will pass. The only question that remains is whether such laws will contain language that protects the religious beliefs of society's many conservative faith-based institutions that may object to providing certain employment opportunities or services to those whose lifestyles do not align with the religious core values of the organization. Here's the challenge for faith leaders and faith-based organizations: whatever their views on expanding SOGI protections, getting engaged in the legislative discussions about the content of such bills will ultimately make better, more just, legislation. As Professor Douglas Laycock, supporter of marriage equality and a strong proponent of religious freedom, stated: "There is now a statewide law barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in Utah--the reddest of red states. And there are important religious exemptions. The religious exemptions made it possible to enact a gay rights law." Instead of asking why people of faith should consider engaging in the shaping of such legislation at all, perhaps the better, but more difficult, question to ask is how? How can faith communities, whether they support or oppose SOGI legislation, engage in the difficult discussions around competing rights? How can they best ensure that religious institutions are protected to fully live out their faith-based beliefs and practices while still protecting gay and transgender individuals from invidious workplace mistreatment? So before Nebraska's next session, and before laws like this are passed everywhere, faith communities need to take some time to think about the important questions that have to be asked, and to seriously consider the limited amount of time in which efforts to protect religious freedom will be viable. There are serious questions that people of faith, or no faith, disagree about, such as whether and to what extent businesses owned by religious individuals ought to be accommodated under such SOGI laws. It is worth considering whether, instead of continuing to fight bills that seek to do justice to historically marginalized LGBT people, faith leaders instead should engage in the difficult conversations about how to protect the legitimate rights of faith-based organizations of all kinds when those bills are put forward. The increasing opposition that people committed to traditional sexual morality face can be a source of motivation. The shared experience of marginalization can be a reason for advocates of SOGI laws and advocates of religious freedom to sit down together to consider how to protect our differing ways of being present in the world. |
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