By Bob Allen
Faith-based organizations with offices in Washington including the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a letter Feb. 5 asking Congress to reject two new District of Columbia laws they say would restrict their religious freedom.
The groups, all national organizations with offices in the nation’s capital, said both the Human Rights Amendment Act of 2014 and the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act of 2014 adopted by the D.C. Council in December violate their religious beliefs.
The D.C. Council voted Dec. 2 to repeal the Armstrong Amendment, an act of Congress passed in 1988 after a court of appeals determined that Catholic-affiliated Georgetown University violated the city’s human rights act by refusing to recognize two student gay-rights groups.
On Dec. 17 the council expanded a requirement that employers not discriminate in “compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment” on the basis of sex to include discrimination based on reproductive health decisions, including abortion.
Faith-based employers including the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission said the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act prevents them “from making employment decisions consistent with their sincerely held religious beliefs or their moral and ethical views about the sanctity of human life.”
The human rights amendment, they said, “requires religiously affiliated educational institutions to endorse, sponsor and provide school resources to persons or groups that oppose the institutions’ religious teachings regarding human sexuality.”
Both laws, they alleged, violate their rights protected both by the Constitution and federal law.
A committee report to the D.C. Council in October said while the District already has one of the strongest anti-discrimination laws in the country, a loophole allowed employers to discriminate against women for seeking to prevent pregnancy, get pregnant through reproductive technology or for having sex outside of marriage.
Some advocates said it could be used to reverse the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision in June 2014, which allowed employers to refuse insurance covering contraceptive services to workers based on religious beliefs of the owners.
The religious groups said the law “requires our organizations to hire or retain individuals whose speech or public conduct contradicts the organizations’ missions, and could be read to require our organizations to subsidize elective abortions through their employee health plans.”
Other groups signing the letter included Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Center for Law and Justice, the Catholic University of America, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council and the National Association of Evangelicals.