By CNS Staff*
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| Archbishop Lori |
Two
chairmen of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement on Monday
lamenting the discrimination against those with religious beliefs found in
President Obama’s executive order which failed to include religious freedom
protections while banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender
identity among federal contractors.
"In
too many states and in too many workplaces, simply being gay, lesbian, bisexual
or transgender can still be a fireable offense," Obama said, according to USA Today.
"So I firmly believe that it's time to address this injustice for every
American."
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| Bishop Malone |
Writing at
the National Catholic Reporter, Fr. Thomas Reese suggested that
Catholic Relief Services, Catholic hospitals, and Catholic schools and colleges
could eventually be impacted. “There is little doubt that if the administration
is successful dealing with contracts, grants will soon be on the firing line,”
he wrote.
Archbishop
William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious
Liberty and Bishop Richard J. Malone of Buffalo, chairman of the Committee on
Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, issued a statement decrying the
“unprecedented and extreme” executive order.
According
to the USCCB, the bishops said in their statement:
In the name of
forbidding discrimination, this order implements discrimination. With the
stroke of a pen, it lends the economic power of the federal government to a
deeply flawed understanding of human sexuality, to which faithful Catholics and
many other people of faith will not assent. As a result, the order will
exclude federal contractors precisely on the basis of their religious beliefs.
More
specifically, the Church strongly opposes both unjust discrimination against
those who experience a homosexual inclination and sexual conduct outside of
marriage, which is the union of one man and one woman. But the executive
order, as it regards federal government contractors, ignores the
inclination/conduct distinction in the undefined term “sexual
orientation.” As a result, even contractors that disregard sexual
inclination in employment face the possibility of exclusion from federal
contracting if their employment policies or practices reflect religious or
moral objections to extramarital sexual conduct.
The executive
order prohibits “gender identity” discrimination, a prohibition that is
previously unknown at the federal level, and that is predicated on the false
idea that “gender” is nothing more than a social construct or psychological
reality that can be chosen at variance from one’s biological sex. This is
a problem not only of principle but of practice, as it will jeopardize the
privacy and associational rights of both federal contractor employees and
federal employees. For example, a biological male employee may be allowed
to use the women’s restroom or locker room provided by the employer because the
male employee identifies as a female.
The
bishops pointed out that many states have passed similar legislation, but most
have included exemptions for religious employers. “The executive order is an
anomaly in this regard, containing no religious liberty protections,” the
bishops said in the statement. “In this way, the order, which is fundamentally
flawed in itself, also needlessly prefers conflict and exclusion over
coexistence and cooperation.”
Last
month, a number of religious leaders and academics, including some with ties to
Catholic colleges, publicly urged Obama to include religious freedom protections in the order.
