White House requiring religious groups to hire gays to receive state funds?

Reuters

The White House will reportedly implement a policy to require charitable humanitarian groups, including religious groups, to accept LGBT applicants to qualify for government funding.

Citing an unnamed source, the US-based Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an anti-LGBT hate group, said the new policy is linked to President Obama's Executive Order 13672 issued last July, which prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

C-Fam said with the purported policy change, "things are about to get exponentially worse for faith-based groups who perform humanitarian tasks and receive not contracts but financial grants for doing so."

It said the July executive order did not include grants.

The White House, the group said, recently directed federal agencies to put "sexual orientation and gender identity" clause in all grant agreements including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which has agreed to implement it.

C-Fam claimed that federal agencies are being pressured to implement the change even without a new executive order.

"The implication of this change would be devastating to those most in need if charitable organizations have to end programs in the poorest regions around the globe if they no longer are eligible for government grants," according to C-Fam.

Faith-based groups, it said, can use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to resist the policy change, but the grant recipient would have to sue the US government to make the claim.

"The White House has been under pressure from Democratic Congressman Bobby Scott and others to remove the religious exemption altogether from the Johnson-era executive order that President Obama amended last summer to include gays," C-Fam said.

It claimed that some federal agencies are hesitant to implement the new policy but could not say no because of pressure from the White House.