Disasters don’t discriminate

Richard A. Sokerka

When Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area last month, newscasts focusing on the disaster reported how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was on the scene ready to help those affected. But so were many houses of worship that willingly opened their doors and welcomed the many who were forced to evacuate their homes. Within their sacred space, they gave them a place to sleep and they fed them. Through their acts of mercy, they were a source of strength to those who had lost everything.

But also like thousands upon thousands of homeowners who lost their homes, many houses of worship also suffered catastrophic damage to their buildings. They need help just like the homeowners. Unfortunately, FEMA has turned their back on houses of worship.

Disasters certainly don’t discriminate, so why does FEMA?

FEMA recognizes that houses of worship are needed partners in the recovery process, yet it bans them from receiving recovery grants that are available to similar private nonprofits. FEMA readily gives grants to rebuild and repair damaged buildings to a broad range of private nonprofit organizations, such as museums, zoos, and even community centers. But churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship are spurned because they use their buildings “primarily for religious purposes.” While FEMA has gone out of its way to thank houses of worship for the shelter and aid they provide when disasters hit their communities, and regularly uses houses of worship as staging areas for relief efforts, it denies them equal access to emergency relief simply because they are “religious.”

This FEMA policy is discriminatory and a slap in the face to religious liberty. That’s why the Becket Fund, a non-profit, public-interest legal and educational institute with a mission to protect the free expression of all faiths, has stepped in filing a lawsuit in federal district court in Texas, arguing that houses of worship should be allowed to apply for FEMA aid. If a museum can apply for FEMA funds, why not churches, synagogues and mosques?

As Becket points out, FEMA’s discriminatory policy “stands in defiance of a recent Supreme Court ruling in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer that protects the right of religious organizations to participate in widely available programs on equal footing with secular organizations.”

The FEMA policy that categorically excludes houses of worship from equal access to disaster-relief grants, is not only discriminatory and unfair, it’s unconstitutional, according to Becket, which argues that it violates the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment under the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer. In that 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court held that excluding churches from a generally available public benefit constitutes religious discrimination and “imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion that triggers the most exacting scrutiny.”

Becket’s Hurricane Harvey lawsuit against FEMA will provide an opportunity to apply Trinity Lutheran to government disaster-relief grants.

Every community in our nation can attest to the fact that houses of worship play pivotal roles when natural disasters strike their communities, above and beyond the services they normally offer.

With certitude, our judicial system should find that FEMA must discontinue its policy of discriminating against houses of worship affected by the hurricane simply because they are “religious.”