Why is Charitable Choice a threat to civil rights laws?
Charitable Choice has considerable implications for our civil rights laws. Charitable Choice authorizes providers with religious affiliation to discriminate on religious grounds in the hiring and firing of publicly funded positions. All Charitable Choice proposals provide specifically that the exemption afforded under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for religious organizations applies to federally funded positions. The Title VII exemption is a common sense provision allowing religious organizations to discriminate based on religion in hiring for church employees. This common exemption allows, for example, a Catholic Church to require that it’s priest be Catholic, but it was intended to be limited to church funds, not governmental funds collected from all taxpayers. Under Charitable Choice, a church sponsoring a federally funded drug program is free to discriminate against job applicants solely on the basis of their religion.
