Following the Law = Bullying?

Jim Towey, head of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has promised religious groups to help them fight "bullying" from local and state governments. Bullying? Well, that's what Towey calls it when religious groups receiving public funds are expected to follow the same laws that every other group has to follow.

The Concord Monitor reports on a speech Towey made in Falmouth, Maine:

He was in Falmouth on Thursday, meeting with leaders of Catholic Charities of Maine. The group sued the city of Portland in March 2003 over its domestic partnership ordinance, which restricts federal funding to the charity. Catholic Charities is barred from receiving certain federal funds from the city unless it provides some benefits to same-sex or unmarried partners of employees. "That may be their prerogative when it's state and local money," Towey said, "but when it's federal money that raises a whole different set of issues."

"It is not bullying to tell a group that it has to obey the same laws as everyone else," said the Rev. Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, based in Washington, D.C. "Mr. Towey, although he talks about a level playing field, in fact wants to require secular groups to abide by civil rights laws but not religious groups. Frankly, they all should abide by basic principles of fairness and equality that we find in the Constitution, if they get federal funds."

Lynn is correct — what religious groups like Catholic Charities, as well as their political partners, want is for the government to fund religious, gender, race, and all sorts of other discrimination in the context of public services. That’s not just wrong, it’s immoral and it’s an assault upon the basic principles of a liberal democracy. Religious groups may have every right to discriminate on their own time, but they cannot expect the public to help them do it by providing the money for it.

Read More:

• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News
• Faith-Based Programs
• Secularism 101