By LOU CHIBBARO JR.
Nov 14 2009, 7:02 AM |
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The gay Catholic group Dignity USA is urging the D.C. City Council to reject a demand by the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington that it amend a pending same-sex marriage bill to allow its charitable arm to discriminate against gay employees.
Dignity weighed in on the brewing controversy over the city’s pending same-sex marriage bill after Catholic Charities, which is run by the Archdiocese, said it would discontinue operating dozens of city-funded programs that serve as many as 68,000 low-income people if the Council doesn’t make certain changes in the bill.
“It’s shameful of the church to put its dogmatic position above the needs of the needy people receiving these services,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, Dignity USA’s executive director.
“I would encourage the City Council to say, fine, we’ll take our programs to another vendor,” Duddy-Burke said.
An official with the Archdiocese said the version of the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Equality Act of 2009 approved Nov. 10 by a City Council committee narrowed rather than broadened a religious exemption clause that the Archdiocese and other religious groups had been calling for.
The bill does not require religious organizations to perform same-sex marriages or make their facilities available for such marriages. But under existing laws, including the D.C. Human Rights Act, religious organizations like Catholic Charities would be barred from denying benefits to their employees’ same-sex married spouses.
Jane Belford, chancellor of the Archdiocese, said the current wording would force Catholic Charities to provide a health insurance benefits plan to its employees in which spousal benefits must be offered to the “same-sex married partner of a gay or lesbian employee.” Doing this would violate Catholic teachings and beliefs that marriage must be restricted to a man and a woman, she said.
She said the bill also would require Catholic Charities and other religious oriented social service providers to facilitate an adoption or foster care for a same-sex couple and would require a local religious community to “make its hall available for events inconsistent with the community’s sincere religious beliefs.”
In a letter to members of the Council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, which voted 4-1 to approve the marriage bill, Belford said the Archdiocese could not continue to operate its social services programs under city contracts if the marriage bill doesn’t waive these non-discrimination requirements for Catholic Charities and other religious groups.
The current language in the bill, she said, “does not permit Catholic Charities and other religious service organizations to freely function as religious entities serving the needs of District residents.”
Literature on the Archdiocese web site says Catholic Charities provides services to 68,000 people in the District. It says the group, among other activities, operates city-owned homeless shelters that serve one-third of the city’s homeless population.
D.C. Council members Phil Mendelson (D-At-Large), who chairs the committee overseeing the same-sex marriage bill, and David Catania (I-At-Large), author of the bill, said they would not yield to threats or demands by the Archdiocese or other groups.
At the time the committee approved the bill at its Nov. 10 markup hearing, Mendelson said broadening the religious exemption to the degree requested by the Archdiocese would result in weakening the city’s Human Rights Act, which protects gays and lesbians from discrimination. He called such a request “unacceptable.”
An official with the D.C. Department of Human Services, which funds and oversees the Catholic Charities-run programs for the city, said the group has an excellent track record of performing services for the homeless and others in need. Although Catholic Charities’ withdrawal from carrying out such services would be a “big loss” for the city, the official said DHS would quickly arrange for other vendors to take on those services. The official spoke on condition of not being identified because the official was not authorized to speak with the media.
In response to a request from the Blade, DHS Director Clarence Carter issued a statement saying, “There would be no disruption of services if Catholic Charities withdraws from our contracts.”
Duddy-Burke said government officials in Massachusetts in 2006 denied a request by Catholic Charities in that state to obtain a waiver from facilitating adoptions or foster care arrangements for same-sex married couples. She said Catholic Charities responded by discontinuing its involvement in adoption and foster care programs in the state.
But she said the Archdiocese of Massachusetts did not discontinue other social services in the state, such as homeless services and emergency food programs for the poor, in response to the state‘s same-sex marriage law.
“In Washington, they have taken this fight a step further than anywhere else,” Duddy-Burke said. “I can’t imagine that even the most conservative Catholic would support walking away from services over this reason.”
Raymond Panas, president of Dignity Washington, said the threat by the Archdiocese to withdraw its services to the needy because it objects to the same-sex marriage bill is inconsistent with true Catholic teaching.
“While this may be the decision of the hierarchy, it certainly does not reflect the views of all of us who were baptized as Catholics and make up part of the Catholic Church,” Panas said.
“We now find ourselves in a…situation where our church hierarchy is making statements/threats that would suggest it would rather abandon part of its mission than to reach to a part of society and members of its faith that it finds as different or does not truly understand,” he said.
Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the ACLU of the D.C. area, which supports the same-sex marriage bill, said he was hopeful that the Archdiocese would follow the lead of its counterpart in San Francisco, which reached a compromise over same-sex partner benefits in 1998.
Spitzer pointed to a San Francisco Chronicle story, which reported that Catholic Charities of San Francisco responded to a 1998 local law requiring all city vendors and contractors to provide domestic partnership benefits to their employees by changing its employee spousal benefits program. Instead of offering benefits to employees’ spouses, the Chronicle said, Catholic Charities offered the same benefits to any one person designated by the employee to receive them, regardless of whether the designated person was a spouse, friend, or relative. Catholic Charities deemed the arrangement acceptable under its religious beliefs and teachings.
When contacted Friday, spokespersons for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Archdiocese of San Francisco said they couldn’t immediately confirm whether the benefit program described by the Chronicle in a 1998 article was still in effect, saying they were making inquiries about the matter and would call back.
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