Bad faith

Does Bush's deal with the Salvation Army shed light on a White House plan to chip away at gay fights?

Troy Perry was supposed to be a perfect catch for the Bush administration. Under its "faith-based" initiative, the predominantly gay Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, which Perry presides over, stood to secure millions in federal dollars for its already burgeoning social service network, which includes soup kitchens and gay youth ministries.

But then there came a catch of a different kind. Perry learned in July that the White House and the Salvation Army had cut a secret deal to allow the Christian charity to evade local laws banning antigay discrimination in exchange for backing Bush's initiative. The UFMCC--with 42,000 members in 300 congregations--vowed to oppose the legislation.

"At first I thought, Isn't this wonderful," Perry says. "Look at all the ways we could help people with the money made available under the plan," which would allow church-run charities to compete for federal grants. "I saw it as having the potential to extend the work we already do. But if the goal is to allow religious groups to circumvent laws against discrimination, rather than reaching out to help the poor, I could never support the bill."

The legislation expanding religious groups' role in delivering federally funded social services passed the House of Representatives July 19, with the GOP majority rejecting an amendment by Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) that would have forced charities to abide by local antidiscrimination laws. The faith-based measure may face a tougher time when it is taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Whatever the fate of the bill, the secret Salvation Army deal opened a rare window into the intimate working relationship between the conservative religious groups that form Bush's political base and Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove. And it underscored long-standing fears among gay rights advocates that the Bush administration might allow antigay political groups to dictate policies on matters such as civil rights and HIV prevention.

"We know that Karl Rove has been communicating regularly with religious conservative groups and is charged with keeping them under control," says David Smith, communications director of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobby group. "What's particularly troubling is that he is delivering to the conservative base but behind closed doors."

In this case, however, Rove's political strategy was revealed. According to a May 1 Salvation Army memo unearthed by The Washington Post, the organization promised to spend about $100,000 per month to lobby for the faith-based initiative. In return, Administration officials would agree to consider the Salvation Army's desire for an ironclad exemption for all religious nonprofits from state and municipal ordinances that "impose the category of sexual orientation to the list of antidiscrimination protections" or that require equal benefits to domestic partners.

The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not include sexual orientation. And the vast majority of the 12 state and 121 municipal gay fights laws already contain broad exemptions for churches and religiously affiliated organizations, as does the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which is currently pending in Congress (and opposed by Bush). But in recent years, the Salvation Army and other religious nonprofits have quarreled with states and localities that require groups receiving public money to adhere to antidiscrimination laws. In 1998, the Salvation Army forfeited its $3.5 million annual contract with San Francisco rather than provide domestic-partner benefits to its San Francisco employees as ordered by the city.

"Basically, conservative Christian charities want the absolute right to hire what they consider good Christians," says Chai Feldblum, a Georgetown University law professor and expert on civil rights law. "And in their view, good Christians don't sleep with people of the same sex. Groups like the Salvation Army want to be able to take public grants and maintain the right to discriminate at the same time."

On the day the report became public, the Bush administration dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney, considered sympathetic to gay causes, to defend the Salvation Army deal. By the end of the day, however, the White House had backed away from consideration of the regulation entirely. But what the Administration sidestepped was the fact that, at least according to some interpretations of the language, the religious exemption is already included in the body of the faith-based bill.

"It doesn't take a lot of courage to kill a regulation that's already been written into a bill," says Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who has led House opposition to the faith-based measure. "The Salvation Army was taking a belt-and-suspenders approach. If they didn't get one, they could still rely on the other."

Frank and other gay critics of the Bush initiative view the secret deal as part of a pattern in which the Administration is chipping away at gay rights to appease conservative supporters. They worry about the effects of the appointments of antigay stalwart John Ashcroft as attorney general, the nation's top civil rights enforcement position, and Kay Coles James, a Christian conservative activist, as director of the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal government's 1.8 million civilian employees. James has compared homosexuality to drug addiction, alcoholism, adultery, or "anything else sinful."

"This episode shows that the Bush administration is in fact more antigay than it pretends to be," Frank says. "On some level they feel they have to cater to those who helped them get where they are today."

It was the odd fingerprints on the secret deal that gave the story, dubbed "Kettlegate" by some gay activists, its legs in the news. The Salvation Army, and not right-wing religious groups with a reputation for antigay activism, was pushing hardest to circumvent local gay rights laws. For the past three decades, the Salvation Army has moved away from street evangelizing to become a more politically neutral service provider, allowing it to rake in millions in government grants. Revealing the deal would risk turning the Salvation Army into the next Boy Scouts, a development the author of the secret memo grasped.

"The Salvation Army's role will be a surprise to many in the media," the memo warned, advocating a strategy to "minimize the possibility of any `leak' to the media." Indeed, many gay activists vowed they would never again donate to the charity, and openly gay District of Columbia council member David Catania, a Republican, threatened to open an inquiry into whether the Salvation Army violates the district's gay-inclusive antidiscrimination law.

In response, the Salvation Army sought to distance itself from the memo. In a July 13 letter to the group's 45,000 employees, national commander John Busby declared that the group does not discriminate in "positions of full-time service, lay leadership, employment, and volunteer service.... Among [our] employees in the USA, there are people of all races, religions and sexual orientation." But Salvation Army officials reiterated that the organization reserves the right to discriminate in its ministerial positions.

The most serious blow to Bush's plan has come from a more surprising source, though. Prominent religious right moguls like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are on record opposing it on the grounds that the federal government could eventually force their organizations to adhere to antidiscrimination statutes that include sexual orientation.

"This is the biggest political obstacle" for the initiative, says Robert Boston, assistant communications director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an opponent of the faith-based initiative. "Robertson knows that there will not always be Republican administrations that look the other way at discrimination. They know that if they take federal money, someone is going to eventually demand that they treat people equally. And they certainly don't ever want that to happen."

Find links and updates on the "faith-based" initiative at www.advocate.com

Bull, The Advocate's Washington correspondent, is coauthor of Perfect Enemies: The Battle Between the Religious Right and the Gay Movement, now in paperback.

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