Plan to Permit Faith-Based Gay Bias Dies

From Catholic Charities in San Francisco to a Baptist home in Kentucky to Salvation Army posts around the country, faith-based groups have long defended personnel practices that collide with public laws.

Now, as President Bush pushes his plan to increase the role of religious groups in providing social services, many are clamoring to keep their special exemption to discriminate in hiring.

In a political firestorm Tuesday, White House officials backed away from a proposal to help the Salvation Army fight for its right to discriminate against homosexuals.

But even without that provision, under legislation working its way through the House, faith-based employers would still retain broad, legal rights to discriminate on religious grounds when hiring--rights they were granted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The bill would “ensure that religious organizations have the right to hire individuals who share their religious faith,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

The dispute over discrimination is only partly about the right of faith-based groups to exclude staffers based on the clear-cut matter of religious affiliation. In addition, critics argue that such traits as sexual orientation, pregnancy status, whether someone has been divorced and possibly gender could be used by faith-based employers to veto potential hires or dismiss employees.

Courts have affirmed the right of a Catholic school to fire a teacher for marrying a divorced man, the right of a Christian retirement home to fire a Muslim receptionist who insisted on wearing a head covering, the right of a Baptist nursing school to fire an employee who became the minister of a gay-oriented church and the right of a Catholic school to dismiss a teacher who remarried without getting her first marriage annulled under Catholic doctrine.

The broad exemption to the civil rights law reflects the demands of many religious institutions to retain their ability to hire those who fit in with their spiritual vision--but also has prompted calls for more rigid limits on possible bias in hiring.

Such discrimination “is the remaining battleground in the war” over Bush’s plan, maintained the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The emotional topic was stirred Tuesday by reports that the White House would propose a new federal regulation enabling charities to get around state and local laws that ban discrimination against gay people. The Salvation Army sought such a rule, the Washington Post reported. In return, the White House reportedly sought the Salvation Army’s political support for Bush’s faith-based initiative.

White House officials Tuesday acknowledged that they been reviewing the proposed new federal regulation, but they denied having reached a deal with the Salvation Army to back the rule in exchange for the charity group’s support of the legislation.

Still, the notion of a secret deal that would have the effect of sanctioning anti-gay discrimination sent shock waves through the Senate, where the Bush proposal is already on shaky ground for potentially eroding the line between church and state.

“It raises a lot of questions,” Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.C.) said Tuesday, cautioning that it “may imperil the president’s efforts to get something passed.”

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, an influential Democrat on the issue of faith in public life, said he was “surprised and upset” by news accounts.

In unusually sharp language, Lieberman warned that it “puts a cloud over the president’s desire to extend the faith-based initiative and might terminally wound it in Congress.”

At the same time, voices on the other side of the debate defended the prerogative of faith-based employers to choose workers whom they deem appropriate.

“A key part of the president’s faith-based initiative is to make certain that, in order to acquire or to participate in providing these social services with government funds, we not require fundamental changes in the underlying principles and organizing doctrines, if you will, of the organizations that participate,” said Vice President Dick Cheney.

The House bill attempts to prevent discrimination against the beneficiaries of faith-based services, by mandating that people be offered secular alternatives. But critics of the initiative would prefer stronger guarantees that faith-based organizations will not mix their social programs with efforts to convert members of the public or with worship services.

In 1997, Catholic Archbishop William Levada threatened to sue San Francisco over a new law that required city contractors to provide gay and lesbian couples the same sorts of benefits that they provided married, heterosexual couples.

The law “challenged our belief in the sanctity of marriage. We couldn’t go along with it,” said Maurice E. Healy, communications director for the San Francisco Archdiocese.

Ultimately, the church and city officials came up with a compromise: Catholic Charities agreed to offer benefits to all “legally domiciled” household members that an employee designated.

Underscoring the political sensitivity of the whole issue, civil libertarians Tuesday lashed out at initial reports that the White House would try to help faith-based groups skirt state and local anti-discrimination laws.

“This is an outrage,” declared Gwenn A. Baldwin, executive director of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. “The Bush administration is completely out of step with the American public around workplace issues. Not only is it wrong to deny people workplace protections, but it’s unconscionable where civil rights have been secured locally.”

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Times staff writer Tynisa E. Trapps contributed to this story.