Last Thursday the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing titled “HHS and the Catholic Church: Examining the Politicization of Grants.” On the surface, holding this hearing sounds like something AU would fully support. However, once again those on the Right have managed to spin things to appear like powerful majority groups are the ones persistently suffering from religious discrimination. From our perspective, claims that any particular group is entitled to a government grant, regardless of what services they do or do not provide in return, are the real politicized accusations that need to be addressed.

George Sheldon, Acting Assistant Secretary of Administration for Women and Families, and Eskinder Negash, Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement for the Administration for Women and Families, both of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), served as witnesses at the hearing. The committee’s questioning focused on the federal grants awarded to assist and treat victims of human trafficking. Recently HHS rejected the Conference of Catholic Bishops’ application for this grant program on the grounds that the group not only refused to provide reproductive health care as a part of their grant services, but would not even refer victims to other providers to receive this care.

Some grants were awarded to organizations ranked lower on the evaluation criteria than the bishops, hence the claims of discrimination. This is because even though providing essential reproductive services was deemed a necessary qualification to receive the grant, it was not made a formal part of the scoring process to rank applicants and so the rankings failed to consider this issue. In reality, the error was not that HHS did not award the grant to the Conference, as they refuse to perform all the necessary and effective services under the grant, but that the evaluation criteria did not reflect the qualifications necessary to perform the job.

As D.C. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton pointed out, however, discussion should not focus on the “rights” of groups competing for grants, but rather on what is actually best for those who have gone through the horrors of human trafficking. In this situation, reproductive health care may truly be a lifesaving service. The hearing highlighted that many survivors are as young as 12 years old and have often been subjected to ongoing rape and sexual abuse. “I would like to take a moment to remind everyone of our ultimate goal here today — to help victims of human trafficking, forced prostitution and sex slavery to escape their conditions and put their lives back together,” reiterated Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s ranking member. “To conduct a responsible review of the process used to award these grants, we need to understand who these victims are, what they have gone through, and why they need reproductive health services.” No group is entitled to receive government money simply because they have in the past, and if the Conference of Catholic Bishops refuses to provide the care young trafficking victims need, they should not be provided the government grant.

The hearing truly emphasized the “politicization of government grants” that has been taking place recently. Quite simply, the organization that can best aid those in need by providing a full range of care should be the one to do so. Alleging “religious discrimination” for not being awarded funds when the organization does not wish to fully perform the necessary services cheapens the real discrimination faced by many minority groups each day. And, awarding the grant to such a group would provide a disservice to trafficking victims. In spite of an increasingly politicized atmosphere, the right decision was made in awarding grants to the best groups for the job.