Watch the fine print

Of course we should help runaway and homeless youth—shouldn’t we? The U.S. Senate, a great deliberative body, is considering S.262, a bill written by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., that would reauthorize the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act. The RHYA brings funding to services for young people, many of them identifying as LGBT, who are on the run and could benefit from a safe place to stay.

The RHYA may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether those services really help a homeless young person or merely enable him to keep running—but the fine print is really troubling. A good watchdog group, the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance (IRFA), points out that S.262 not only forbids discrimination but “(1) applies to the religious hiring practices of faith-based grantees; (2) applies to privately funded programs offered by grantees, which could make it illegal to offer private programs that require religious activity or that teach that LGBT conduct violates religious standards; (3) applies far beyond the program for runaway and homeless youth to EVERY grant program authorized by the Administration for Children and Families in the [Health and Human Services] Department—TANF services, marriage and fatherhood programs, refugee programs, child care, abstinence education, and much much more.”

S.262, if passed as is, would discriminate against many effective religious organizations, forcing them either to violate their faith or give up serving young people in need. The bill’s sweeping language could become a precedent in other federal programs. One precedent already exists in the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which an inattentive Congress passed without noting its sweeping, religion-unfriendly provisions. No one wanted to vote against vulnerable women.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was supposed to take up the bill today but didn’t, partly because of concerns related to the discrimination language. Meanwhile, IRFA hopes to call more attention to S.262’s flaws. Angelic folks could also call Senate offices and point out the devil in the details.