WASHINGTON (ABP) — For the second time in as many years, a House panel has approved a bill that would allow some government-funded charities to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion.
On a party-line vote Feb. 9, a subpanel of the House Education and Workforce Committee approved the “Job Training Improvement Act.” The act reauthorizes a federal program that funds local organizations helping provide unemployed people with marketable job skills.
The committee's 15 Democrats voted against the bill, while its 18 Republicans supported the legislation.
The proposal would remove protections for employees seeking jobs from religious social-service providers funded under the program. The 1964 Civil Rights Act already allows churches and synagogues to discriminate in hiring for most positions on the basis of religious principles. However, the courts have not definitively settled the issue of whether religious groups retain that right when hiring for a position wholly or partly funded by tax dollars.
The 1982 Workforce Investment Act, which set up the program, originally prohibited organizations receiving grants under it from discriminating on the basis of religion, race, gender and other categories. The new bill would remove those protections only for religious providers, and only on the basis of religion.
“If this bill passes… we will be repealing civil-rights protections that have been in effect for decades,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), who offered an amendment to the bill that would restore the 1982 language on religious discrimination. It failed.
But freshman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said Scott's amendment “in itself would discriminate against faith-based organizations.” She said religious groups “can't be expected to sustain their religious mission without the ability to employ people who share the tenets of their faith.”
But several Democrats on the panel said Republican supporters of the proposal were trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Because the courts do not allow direct government funding of religious activity, they argued, religious charities should be able to hire qualified people of any faith for government-funded job-training services without compromising their religious mission.
“The question is whether, once they've received federal dollars, they should be able to discriminate in employment based on religion in the providing of non-religious services,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
“We all agree it is not lawful for these organizations to use federal dollars to promote particular religions,” he continued. “And therefore, at the same time, to argue that it is more effective for them to be able to discriminate on the basis of religion is nonsensical.”
But Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) noted that his downtown church in Grand Rapids offers many ministries to the community that, while delivering services that have no explicitly religious components, nonetheless are done with a religious mission in mind.
“We want staff in total agreement with the mission of the church as we know it,” Ehlers said. “We would want [the program] to operate according to the philosophy of faith of the church.”
The issue has come to a head in the past few years, as President Bush has pushed for more federal funding of social services through churches and other religious charities. Though he failed to pass his “faith-based initiative” in its entirety through Congress, he has slowly implemented many parts of it via executive orders and other administrative actions.
Meanwhile, the House has done its part to aid piecemeal implementation of Bush's plan, including adding similar employment-discrimination provisions to a number of bills funding social-service providers. But most of those attempts have been thwarted in the Senate.
In 2003, the House passed a bill similar to the Job Training Investment Act that included an identical provision on religious discrimination. However, it never passed the Senate.
The current bill is H.R. 27. It will likely be considered by the full House before the end of February.