Separation of Church & Gay

In the privacy of their prayer breakfasts and retreats, when conservative religious people talk about the Bush administration's faith-based initiative, what do they worry about most?

Not federal money going to Scientologists. Not being told they can't evangelize people they serve at soup kitchens. Not even filling out government paperwork.

	poll Should publicly funded faith-based groups be allowed to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring? No, it's a civil rights issue. Yes, if their faith opposes homosexuality. View Results

It's homosexuals. Conservatives' biggest fear is that by partnering with the federal government, they may lose control over who they are allowed to hire and fire--especially when it comes to gays.

Gay rights may seem an unlikely battlefield for this issue, but it has the potential to sink President Bush's faith-based initiatives altogether. On this issue, Bush faces a frontal assault from both left and right--and satisfying one side ensures that the other will want no part of the plan.

"[Evangelicals] worry about that more than almost any other concern," says John Green, a religion and politics expert at the University of Akron.

"It's not worth getting government funds if we have to hire people diametrically opposed to what we believe," said Janet Folger, national director of the Center for Reclaiming America, an affiliate of Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale. Folger was the architect of a widely publicized full-page newspaper ad campaign three years ago urging homosexuals to change their orientation.

And it's not just evangelicals: Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics, among others, have similar concerns. Control of who they hire is critical to religious groups' ability to control their message--and to equate that with bigotry is "incredibly reckless," says Nathan Diament, president of the Institute of Public Affairs of the Orthodox Union, a Jewish organization

"This is not bigotry," Diament says. "This is religious freedom. It's the right of a religious organization to define itself."

It may become a litmus test issue among liberals as well. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a strong supporter of faith-based action, told Beliefnet recently that he could not support legislation that discriminated against gays. "I feel strongly that we can't adopt a system here that allows religious groups to meet a lower standard of civil rights protection than nonreligious groups," he said.

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