Religious-Liberty-Annual-Report

20 IV – Religious Liberty and the Executive Branch

embedded within the sprawling regulations that govern grants, contracts, and other financial as sistance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). With little fanfare, late in 2016, the Obama Administration’s HHS added provisions prohibiting recipients of such funding from discriminating on the basis of religion, “sex ual orientation,” and “gender identity,” and requir ing recipients to treat same-sex civil marriages as valid in keeping with the Supreme Court’s deci sions on same-sex marriage in U.S. v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges . 13 These two paragraphs in the Code of Federal Regulations became known as the “Grants Rule.” Under the Trump Administration, HHS re placed the Grants Rule’s list of nondiscrimina tion requirements with a more general provision requiring recipients to abide by applicable federal civil rights law, and a provision stating that HHS would follow all applicable Supreme Court rul ings. 14 The revisions were immediately challenged in court.

the bipartisan support necessary for the bill to pass — both the lead Democrat and Republican sponsors of PWFA stated on the Senate floor that PWFA cannot be construed to cover abortion. As a way to mitigate the harm should the EEOC adopt an unlawful interpretation of PWFA, the bill also incorporates the exemption for religious employ ers in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In August 2023, in complete disregard of the intent of Congress, the EEOC issued proposed reg ulations for PWFA that construe it to require ac commodations for abortion, in vitro fertilization, and contraception, and possibly other procedures or arrangements that go against the beliefs of Cath olics and other faith groups, such as sterilization and surrogacy. 12 These requirements would most typically arise in the case of employees’ requests for leave to obtain and recover from such procedures. The proposed regulations’ interpretation of PWFA’s religious exemption, while ambiguous, appears to render it completely ineffective. The EEOC argues that the exemption only protects against claims of discrimination on the basis of an employee’s religion. But nothing in PWFA prohib its discrimination on the basis of religion, so an exemption from such claims would be wholly in applicable to PWFA’s requirements. In complete disregard of the intent of Congress, the EEOC issued proposed regulations for PWFA that construe it to require accommodations for abortion, in vitro fertilization, and contraception, and possibly other procedures or arrangements that go against the beliefs of Catholics and other faith groups, such as sterilization and surrogacy.

B. Regulations on Human Sexuality Issues

1. HHS Grants Rule The HHS Grants Rule is a particular provision

Wikipedia/Sarah Stierch