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Backlash to New York City Council's health benefits demand
Three weeks ago, the New York City Council overwhelmingly passed the Equal Benefits Bill (full text | press release PDF | video-hi | video-lo | audio), which requires all organizations contracting with the city to provide the same benefits to employees' "domestic partners" as they do to employees' spouses.

There's just one problem: one of the city's largest aid organizations believes that there are important differences between heterosexual, married spouses and unmarried and gay couples. The New York Post reports that the Salvation Army won't follow the new law, and may reject millions of dollars it receives each year from the city. Such a massive funding cut would of course lead to widespread program cuts—so much so that the paper characterizes it as "leaving town."

"The Army will not change its policy," an unnamed official told Post reporter Brad Hamilton. "You cannot change theological views. Those are so deeply embedded, they form the root of the faith itself."

But the bill's chief sponsor says the Army is mistaken. The law doesn't require that the church support homosexual and unmarried sex, she says, only that it provide benefits to "any family member" of an employee.

"I think the bill makes a very fair accommodation for religious organizations," Christine Quinn told the Post. "I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with the Salvation Army and explain how this would work, that they could keep their contracts, abide by the law, and not violate their core religious beliefs."

There's clearly some disagreement on the nature of the bill, so here's what it says:

"Domestic partners" means persons who have registered with the city clerk as domestic partners, or who are the members of a domestic partnership or other civil union recognized by another jurisdiction, or who have registered as domestic partners with a contractor pursuant to subdivision m of this section. … No contracting agency shall … discriminate … between employees with domestic partners and employees with spouses and/or between domestic partners and spouses of such employees.

Quinn is right that the bill doesn't say anything about homosexual relationships. But it doesn't say "any family member" either. Several evangelical leaders have actually supported domestic partnership benefit programs just like this, but for now that seems beside the point—other evangelicals might approve, but the Salvation Army apparently doesn't. And forcing them to approve is extremism, says National Review Managing Editor Jay Nordlinger. "The air space in American life seems to be tightening. Won't our new diversity tolerate the Salvation Army? Is it, too, to be labeled a 'hate' group?"

Religious freedom:

• Leader in banned church said arrested | Police arrested a leader in China's unofficial Christian movement after raiding a church festival attended by thousands of people, an overseas monitoring group reported Tuesday (Associated Press)
  
  
• Bombing at Christian market in Indonesia's Ambon city kills one, wounds 13 | The city in the eastern Maluku islands is still recovering from an outbreak of Muslim-Christian violence which began on April 25 (AFP)
  
  
• Muslim sues over Disney's dress code | Her civil-rights suit claims the company fired her because of her religious head scarf (The Orlando Sentinel)
  
  
• Call to prayer is unsettling in Hamtramck | Despite the outcry, mosque to proceed with religious practice (The Detroit News)
  
  

Sudan:

• Some 56 killed in W.Sudan militia raid, say witnesses | Arab militiamen killed at least 56 people in a raid in western Sudan, just days after the government declared the region stable (Reuters)
  
  

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May (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48