Barney Frank: “if what the previous gentleman said was in the bill, it would be much less controversial. It does change civil rights…”

“if what the previous gentleman said was in the bill, it would be much less controversial. It does change civil rights laws. It preempts, as the chairman of the committee acknowledged in the debate, all State and local laws that many of these organizations do now have to abide by in their purely secular activity, and it allows discrimination with Federal funds for purely secular activities. It says, ``No, you can't discriminate based on race, but you can based on religion.'' But, sadly, all too often in America, religion becomes a proxy for race. When Orthodox Jews get this money in Brooklyn, no blacks will be hired. When the Nation of Islam gets this money in Baltimore to deal with public housing, no whites will be hired. In fact, religion is all too often correlated with race. And when you say to religious groups, provide a purely secular activity with Federal tax dollars but in employing people to serve the soup or build the homes or clean up or give drug treatment, hire only your own co-religionists, you are empowering people de facto to engage in racial segregation. That is not worthy of the purposes of this bill.”