“[Employees] are expected to act in ways that promote the best interest of our faith and church.”

Take a guess at where this sentence is from. Looking at it out of context, I’d assume it’s part of some type of employment paperwork or memo to a house of worship’s administrative staff, probably in a mainstream Christian church. Nothing unexpected or objectionable, in that scenario.

Unfortunately, that scenario isn’t accurate. This statement is from language recently added to a hiring letter used by Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, the local branch of the Catholic Church’s charitable organization. Catholic Charities, including the Washington, DC branch, is a privately-run non-profit, which means they can set whatever guidelines they deem necessary for their employees. Except that Catholic Charities accepts government funding for their work ($22 million from the city of Washington), and are thus using taxpayer funds to discriminate against potential employees on the basis of their religious beliefs.

Catholic Charities has specified that this statement only applies to employees while they are on the job, but there are some major problems with that. Promoting “the best interest” of the Catholic faith in a way that does “not violate the principles or tenets of [that] faith” implies that the charity and its employees will not provide services to people who don’t adhere to their church’s teachings, among which are the convictions that homosexuality and divorce are sins, and that the sole reason for romantic relationships between men and women is procreation.

So is Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington going to conduct extensive interviews with the immigrants, refugees, homeless and other people their programs seek to help on the values they possess? Will anyone who is divorced, a former convict, living with a significant other out of wedlock, using birth control or part of the LGBT community be denied a helping hand?

And where will the line be drawn for employees? Someone who is divorced is still divorced when they arrive at the office. Will their employer continue to regard them as married, despite their legal status? Will human resources require some additional, euphemistic reason to remove the employee’s former spouse from his or her health insurance coverage? Will LGBT employees be required to not discuss or refer to any aspect of their personal lives that allude to the fact that they’re gay? If the discrimination inherent in this language was being promoted on the Catholic church’s own dime, it wouldn’t be an issue as it would be their choice, but the government is a major source of Catholic Charities’ funding and using tax dollars to discriminate or proselytize is not okay.

This isn’t Catholic Charities’ first incident entangling religion and government in the Washington, DC area in recent weeks; on Monday, March 1st, an announcement was made that new employees would not have the option of adding spouses to their health insurance, nor would current employees whose spouses were not already covered. A month prior, the non-profit transferred its foster-care program to a private Baptist charity, The National Center for Children and Families, rather than license same-sex couples as foster parents, as they would have been required to do under the new DC law that began allowing same-sex marriage on March 3rd. Neither of these things is illegal, but it calls into question both Catholic Charities’ concern for their employees’ health and well-being and their dedication to charitable work for its own sake, rather than for the sake of an audience to which to proselytize.

Catholic Charities has a decision to make: is promoting Catholicism the main purpose of their charitable work, or is extending a helping hand to anyone who needs it? If the latter is the answer, they need to accept that we live in a diverse society and that the secular government that funds their work demands equal treatment for all of its citizens – treatment they need to reflect as a government-funded entity. If the answer is the former, they need to stop accepting government funds. Period.

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A spate of recent articles examine the potential overlap between the goals of the Religious Right and those of the Tea Party movement and all three of these pieces add another layer of nuance to the question about whether the tax protest group that advocates “a return to the Constitution” plans to some how merge with religious conservatives who advocate a return to “the Christian roots” of our country.  Writing in The New York Times, journalist Kate Zernike points out that the Tea Party movement has purposely avoided hot-button social issues, sticking instead to its anti-tax and anti-big government message.  Zernike quotes surveys in which Tea Party leaders consistently choose the budget and the economy as the most important issues facing our country. None select social issues and this is no accidental oversight.  Tea Party-ers seem to want to avoid the distraction of the James Dobson crowd and Zernike provides this particularly telling quote: “Every social issue you bring in, you’re adding planks to your mission,” said Frank Anderson, a founder of the Independence Caucus, based in Utah. “And planks become splinters.”

Although the Tea Party might not want them and their splinters, the Religious Right appears eager to join.  Los Angeles Times reporter Kathleen Hennessey interviewed many conservative religious figures for her recent article and many of them argue in favor of joining the Tea Party ranks. Hennessey has her own telling exchange:

“Ken Blackwell, a research fellow at the Family Research Council who has also been active in the tea party movement in Ohio, is among those who see tea partyers as the “younger siblings” in the movement.

Social conservatives are happy to embrace the economic message and those carrying it under the tea party banner “as long as they don’t start advocating against traditional marriage or for abortion,” Blackwell said, putting the tea parties in their place.

“The sibling is not now the parent,” he said.”

And our good friend Sarah Posner over at Religion Dispatches has a great post on a new non-profit started by the former Christian Coalition head, Ralph Reed.  Reed, as head of the newly formed Faith and Freedom Coalition, is actively trying to bridge the gap between conservative social issues and conservative economics.  Read her analysis here and check out Sarah’s recent interview with Welton on this very topic.

So what do you think? Who has the upper hand here and what does the future hold for these two groups – Tea Party and Religious Right? Tell us.

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You just can’t make this stuff up.  Today, the Texas State Board of Education voted on a variety of amendments to the state social studies and U.S. government curricula.  Get ready to be appalled at the outcomes.  As reported by the Texas Freedom Network, the Board voted to

1)      remove Thomas Jefferson from world history curriculum on the impact of Enlightenment thinkers

2)      include discussion of the right to bear arms in curriculum on First Amendment rights and free expression

3)      strike down an amendment that would have required students to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.”

What is most unbelievable and emblematic of the Board’s far-right majority’s (lack of) understanding of the separation between religion and government in America is the third item in this litany of woes.  According to Cynthia Dunbar (one of the more prominent conservatives on the Board), the separation of religion and government wasn’t actually the Founders’ intent— they wanted to promote religion.  Therefore, said Dunbar, the proposed amendment was “not historically accurate.”

While (luckily), Thomas Jefferson isn’t out of Texas education curricula as a whole, there is no doubt that he is one of the preeminent American scholars of the Enlightenment era and it is a shame students will not learn that.  Also, last time I checked, the right to bear arms had its own section of the Bill of Rights, you know, the Second Amendment.

What’s more unfortunate is that such a narrow minded group of individuals have such power over what children learn across the country, that these are “guidelines that will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years.”  Why? Because the state of Texas buys or distributes “a staggering 48 million textbooks annually,” which leads “educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State.”

To quote our friends at the Texas Freedom Network: “Let the word go out here: The Texas State Board of Education today refused to require that students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others. They voted to lie to students by omission.”

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