God or mammon: when religious groups get caught between their principles and their subsidies.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns - Column

THE SALVATION ARMY, with its bells and kettles, is ubiquitous in the Christmas season. In our contentious times, it is also the center of a controversy over religion, public funding for charities, and discrimination.

In May the New Fork Post reported that the Salvation Army, which has provided social services and Christian ministry to the poor around the world for more than 125 years, could be pulling out of New York City rather than provide health insurance benefits to domestic partners of gay employees, as New York City law may soon require. The legislation, passed in May, would require all businesses and nonprofits that have contracts with the city worth at least $100,000 to provide the benefits.

At this writing, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a moderate and generally pro-gay rights Republican, is suing to block enforcement of the legislation, which is also vehemently opposed by Catholic Charities. (One of Bloomberg's appointees to the city's Human Rights Commission, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Matt Foreman, resigned from the commission over the mayor's position on this issue.)

Regardless of how the skirmish is ultimately resolved, the question of whether religious organizations with secular functions will have to sacrifice their traditional moral beliefs to modern anti-discrimination laws will surely remain at the center of the culture wars.

This is not the first time the Salvation Army, which defines itself as an evangelical Christian church, has faced this issue. In 1998 it chose to forgo $3.5 million a year in public funding in San Francisco after the city passed an ordinance requiring all firms with city contracts to offer benefits to their staffers' domestic partners. In 2001, with similar problems looming in Los Angeles and several other major West Coast cities with legal protections for domestic partnerships, the Salvation Army's leadership approved a policy that would allow employees in its Western region to buy insurance coverage for one "legally domiciled adult"--who could be a same-sex partner or a relative sharing the employee's household. Right-wing religious groups such as Focus on the Family and the American Family Association were quick to cry foul, lamenting that the Salvation Army was trying to "ignore the moral standard for behavior set by God." Faced with the prospect of losing millions in donations from conservative Christians, the national leadership reversed itself and rescinded the...