As if attempts at the state level weren’t lesson enough, conservative lawmakers just introduced a federal religious license to discriminate bill to allow child welfare providers to discriminate against gay people.
Conservatives across America are claiming religious persecution — especially of Christians — by the LGBT community and its allies, despite the fact that Christians make up about 80 percent of America and the LGBT community only about four percent. A string of nearly 30 federal court decisions in support of same-sex marriage in little over a year has shaken their previously presumed right to discriminate and they are scrambling to reassert that privilege.
Take U.S. Senator Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, and U.S. Congressman Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania. The pair have teamed up to introduce the “Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2014” (PDF) to “ensure that organizations with religious or moral convictions are allowed to continue to provide services for children.”
“Anti-faith bias making it harder for some children to get help,” a press release from the conservative duo reads.
“There is no good reason why any of these care providers should be disqualified from working with their government to serve America’s families simply because of their deeply-rooted religious beliefs,” Rep. Kelly insists.
The legislation codifies the claim that the “right to free exercise of religion for child welfare service providers includes the freedom to refrain from conduct that conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs,” which is not in dispute. What is disputable is that the state — in the form of local, state, or federal agencies, supported by your tax dollars — is required to support religious organizations’ anti-gay policies.
In short, conservatives want taxpayers to ignore the law so they can have their cake and eat it too. They would like to let child welfare agencies refuse to let same-sex couples or gay people adopt children in their care.
In other words, conservatives are looking for a sort of Hobby Lobby law to make certain religious adoption agencies and other child welfare organizations can continue to discriminate against gay people while ensuring tax dollars pay for that license to discriminate.
“The Family Research Council, an anti-LGBT hate group, similarly praised the legislation Wednesday, calling it ‘a common-sense bill that excludes no one and seeks to maximize the number of providers serving our nation’s most vulnerable children,'” Zack Ford at ThinkProgress reports.
In all of the cases Enzi and Kelly cite, Catholic Charities was faced with three choices: serve all couples equally, continue discriminating and operate without state funding, or shut down entirely. Catholic Charities always voluntarily chose to shut down. In Massachusetts, the first state where this conflict arose, Catholic Charities was already providing adoption services to same-sex couples and its 42-member board had unanimously agreed to continue doing so. It was four bishops who in 2006 arbitrarily shut the operation down in protest of the state’s nondiscrimination law protecting same-sex couples.
Since then, the Catholic Church has used the threat of ending adoption services as a political tool to oppose marriage equality or civil unions for same-sex couples. In Illinois, for example, the organization fought for the privilege to continue receiving state funding while discriminating after civil unions passed there in 2011, but a state judge ruled in favor of the state’s right to cancel the contracts (the very action Enzi and Kelly’s bill would prohibit).
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the official representative of the Roman Catholic Church in America, issued a statement “strongly“ endorsing the bill.Â
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Image by Tom Woodward via Flickr