Religious Discrimination and the Violence Against Women Act

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/7939/religious_discrimination_and_the_violence_against_women_act/

June 13, 2014 10:53am
Post by SARAH POSNER

A coalition of 90 religious, educational, health, women's, LGBT, and civil rights groups this week called on the Department of Justice to abandon a 2007 Office of Legal Counsel Memo that interprets the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to allow faith-based organizations receiving federal funding to circumvent federal prohibitions on hiring discrimination in employment.

A smaller coalition, known as the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD), has been pressing the Obama administration to reverse this Bush-era rule since early in President Obama's first term. This larger coalition was prompted to act in light of a recent announcement by the Department of Justice that, despite explicit language in the 2013 Violence Against Women Act, faith-based contractors receiving taxpayer funding through VAWA programs could be permitted to discriminate in hiring.

Since 2009, when first launching the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the Obama administration has insisted that it was looking at such instances of possible hiring discrimination on a "case-by-case" basis, a vague response that did not fully explain how the Department of Justice was permitting hiring discrimination to occur.

In 2012, though, in response to Congressional questioning, the Department of Justice finally made its policy clear: if "a religious organization that applies for funding and requests an exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to enable it to prefer coreligionists in employment, notwithstanding a statutory prohibition on religious employment discrimination," it may receive such an exemption if it certifies (1) that it provides services to all, regardless of the beneficiary's own religious beliefs; (2) that its explicitly religious content will be kept separate from federally-funded services; and (3) that "the Applicant is a religious organization that sincerely believes that providing the services in question is an expression of its religious beliefs; that employing individuals of a particular religion is important to its religious exercise; and that having to abandon its religious hiring practice in order to receive the federal funding would substantially burden its religious exercise."

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