Bad Bill in the House 

Thursday, July 19, 2001; Page A26 

HOUSE REPUBLICAN leaders yesterday delayed a scheduled vote on a version of President Bush's "faith-based" proposal to make greater use of religious organizations in the provision of social services with federal funds. The leadership wasn't sure it had a majority, which is just as well: This is a bad bill. It should have been written cautiously if written at all. Instead it was aggressively drawn, in part to score political points. In its present form it would infringe on civil liberties, civil rights and even the states' rights its sponsors profess to support in other contexts. The House should vote it down.

Religious organizations already have wide legal latitude, denied to others, to engage in discrimination in employment. They can limit their hiring not just to members of their faith, but to people who adhere to whatever may be its "tenets and teachings," including those having to do with sexual orientation, marriage, divorce, pregnancy out of wedlock, abortion, etc. They appear to be able to do so without regard to whether a job has religious content -- when picking janitors as well as priests.  Since the welfare reform act of 1996, they have also had a limited right to do so when spending not just their own money, but certain government funds. The act allowed, indeed encouraged, states to channel federal funds to faith-based organizations to help move women off welfare. The organizations were free, at least so far as the act was concerned, to follow their own hiring dictates, not the government's.

The House legislation would give such organizations the right to apply for a broader array of grants in additional fields -- housing and education, for example. They would take their hiring exemptions with them; more federal funds could thus be used for what, in other circumstances, would be regarded as discriminatory hiring. In addition, the legislation would exempt the grantees from state and local laws forbidding employment discrimination, even by religious organizations, against such groups as gays. What business of the federal government is that? The Salvation Army wanted the Bush administration to provide such protection from state and local law through regulation. The administration demurred, or pretended to, even as the House was preparing at its request to provide even stronger protection by statute.  That's a shell game.

Current law also forbids faith-based organizations receiving federal grants from discriminating among recipients or applicants for services on religious grounds. In  other words, they may not favor applicants of their own faith. The House bill pretends to extend that rule even while laying the groundwork for its evasion by authorizing the conversion of federal grants to vouchers. If the aid goes to individuals who then come to the organizations, the organizations are freer to conduct their programs as they please, is the reasoning -- and the bill would put fewer strictures on them. Similarly, they would be more free if funded through vouchers to engage in proselytizing.

But that, too, seems to us a shell game. The separation of church and state has never been complete in this country, and never will be. Governments -- federal, state and local -- provide religious organizations with all manner of tax and other subsidies, and government funds are given to institutions with strong religious affiliations -- hospitals, schools, Head Start centers -- for the provision of services every day. So the line is blurred. But the fact that some public money is already spent to support religious institutions is not necessarily an argument for further relaxation of the boundaries. It is just as easily an argument for caution. Church and state are a flammable mix. This divisive bill ignores the danger. It ought not pass.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company