Last summer, the Obama Administration proposed a rule adding sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI—get used to the acronym) to the list of classes protected against discrimination by federal contractors. In so doing, it built upon other anti-discrimination executive orders issued by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. The difference between the Obama Administration’s rule and those promulgated by its predecessors is that the latter explicitly provided exemptions for religious employers, who were permitted to engage in mission-sensitive hiring even if they provided goods and services to the federal government. Under the old rules, a faith-based organization could hire co-religionists to work, for example, in a federally-funded Welfare-to-Work program (and, of course, could quite rightly not discriminate in providing benefits to clients). Under the new rules, finalized in April, there is no exemption for faith-based organizations, many of whom would seem to have to abandon their historical commitments to sexual fidelity in the context of man-woman marriage if they wish to continue to be eligible for federal contracts.
And now the other (or another, perhaps the first of many) shoe is about to drop: there is word that the rule applied to federal contractors will soon be extended to grant recipients, at least in respect to one area of federal activity, humanitarian aid. As this move has not received a lot of attention (perhaps designedly so), it is not clear how far-reaching this change is. At the moment, it seems relatively safe to say that eligibility for some grants will likely be conditioned on a renunciation of traditional religious teaching (not just Christian, but also Jewish and Muslim) regarding human sexuality.
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