Prometheus 6

“It’s not hard to understand why faith-based organizations need to discriminate on the basis of religion to maintain their essentially religious character,” Mr. Rosen wrote. “A Jewish organization forced to hire Baptists soon ceases to be Jewish at all.”

The problem is, government funded tasks are not essentially religious. There's also the nonsense that a single Baptist in the midst of a Jewish owned organization causes the organization to no longer be Jewish. Unless they're asserting the equally absurd argument that one Baptist would cause an influx of Baptists that must be hired.

When you're talking about leadership positions in a religious organization, faith and knowledge of doctrine is a legitimate job requirement. There's no need to legally validate discrimination to protect them. And the government isn't paying for leadership positions in churches.

Mr. Rosen also noted that “without the ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring and firing staff, religious organizations lose the right to define their organizational mission enjoyed by secular organizations that receive public funds.” If Planned Parenthood could refuse to hire people disagreeing with its views about abortion, why should churches, mosques and synagogues not have the same right?

Is Planned Parenthood federally funded? Besides, anti-abortion types cannot properly council folks who have decided to have an abortion. Again, we're talking job requirements here.

Add to that the fact that Planned Parenthood is neither church nor state and so the separation of church and state doesn't apply to them any more than anti-discrimination law applies to family businesses with like 20-30 employees.

Obama Sets Off a Debate on Ties Between Religion and Government
By PETER STEINFELS

On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama did his best to reclaim for Democrats the idea of partnerships between government and grass-roots religious groups — and except for six little words he did a very smooth job.

First, he recalled his own community service in Chicago, noting that it had been church supported.

Then he reminded listeners that it was President Bill Clinton who signed landmark legislation widening the role religion-based groups could play in government-financed programs, and Al Gore who in 1999 first proposed a full-scale religion-based initiative.

While Mr. Obama acknowledged President Bush’s promise to “rally the armies of compassion” through such an initiative, he maintained that the promise had gone unfulfilled because of too little financing and too much partisanship — and that he, Barack Obama, would not only carry out but also expand what Mr. Bush had pledged.

He was two-thirds of the way through his remarks when he inserted the six words with the potential to put his whole effort at risk. Speaking “as someone who used to teach constitutional law,” he spelled out “a few basic principles” to reassure listeners that such partnerships between religious groups and the government would not endanger the separation of church and state.

“First,” he said, “if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion.”

That little phrase between the dashes — “or against the people you hire” — ignited a political explosion. “Fraud,” declared Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. “What Obama wants,” Mr. Donohue said, is “to secularize the religious workplace.” In its newsletter, the conservative Family Research Council called Mr. Obama’s position “a body blow to religious groups that apply for federal funds.” No less heated reactions came from the other end of the political spectrum, where the Obama proposal was denounced not for that short phrase but for what liberals saw as an abandonment of their principles and part of a suspicious move toward the center.

The intense reaction on both sides was pretty predictable, but some people offered more analytic reactions. They welcomed Mr. Obama’s stance, yet made it clear that those six words pointed to deeper questions about religious freedom that could very well seal the fate not only of any new and potentially improved partnerships between government and religious groups but also even those partnerships that, in reality, had been operating for decades.