The New York Times is running a terrific series, which started yesterday, on the sometimes-extraordinary benefits extended to religious organizations, which their counterparts, including non-profit organizations, cannot legally receive. A religious day care center, for example, is entitled to tax-breaks and regulatory exemptions that a secular day care center isn’t eligible for.
The NYT series has already included some fascinating anecdotal examples, but one from yesterday stood out.
[Ohio attorney J. Jeffrey Heck’s] client was a middle-aged novice training to become a nun in a Roman Catholic religious order in Toledo. She said she had been dismissed by the order after she became seriously ill — including a diagnosis of breast cancer.
In her complaint, the novice, Mary Rosati, said she had visited her doctor with her immediate supervisor and the mother superior. After the doctor explained her treatment options for breast cancer, the complaint continued, the mother superior announced: “We will have to let her go. I don’t think we can take care of her.”
Some months later Ms. Rosati was told that the mother superior and the order’s governing council had decided to dismiss her after concluding that “she was not called to our way of life,” according to the complaint. Along with her occupation and her home, she lost her health insurance, Mr. Heck said.
Rosati sued the diocese for firing her because of her illness. Had she worked for any business in America, she would have prevailed — the Americans with Disabilities Act offers protections against this kind of treatment. But Rosati’s case was thrown out of court; a federal judge ruled that “the First Amendment requires churches to be free from government interference in matters of church governance and administration.”
There are rules and laws that apply to workplaces, but if it’s a religious workplace, the rules don’t apply.
It’s not just about who a ministry can hire and fire.
Legislators and regulators are not the only people in government who have drafted special rules for religious organizations. Judges, too, have carved out or preserved safe havens that shield religious employers of all faiths from most employee lawsuits, from laws protecting pensions and providing unemployment benefits, and from laws that give employees the right to form unions to negotiate with their employers.
The NYT series, which started yesterday and continues today, points to a series of rather startling examples of religious organizations enjoying exemptions from all kinds of laws, simply because they’re religious. There’s a lot to this, of course, but two quick thoughts immediately came to mind.
One, it’s a little easier to buy into the rationale behind these special rights when ministries are entirely private, but let’s not forget that many of these same religious groups want public funds, either through private school vouchers, grants from Bush’s faith-based initiative, or both. In each instance, the organizations insist that they’re entitled to the taxpayer money and there’s no reason for them to accept any of the strings (i.e., accountability) that generally comes with public funding.
And two, remind me again why conservatives believe that there’s some kind of “war on religion” underway? When ministries enjoy financial, employment, and regulatory breaks that secular organizations can only dream of, doesn’t that pretty thoroughly debunk the religious right’s talking points about anti-faith persecution?