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emergency shelter for homeless men in Washington, D.C. is under
fire for its lack of Spanish-speaking
personnel.
The case of La Casa shelter should terrify every advocate of encouraging
churches to accept federal funds to conduct programs for the needy.
Najiya Shana’a,
executive director of Neighbors’ Consejo told the Washington
Post that the lack of bilingual services at La Casa shelter
was discrimination: “[e]verything was geared to the English speaker.”
Another Neighbors’ Consejo staff member, Lourdes Carazo, complained:
“late at night, they do not staff the place with bilingual workers,
so if a Latin person is in crisis, they cannot help.”
Manuel Cordova,
an immigrant from El Salvador complained that “the people who work
there prefer blacks.” One La Casa employee, Gregory Williams, was
criticized by a “formerly homeless” El Salvadoran for “speak[ing]
[English] really, really quickly.”
Complaints
of discrimination in anti-poverty programs are almost as old as
the Christian church: “And in those days . . . there arose a murmuring
of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected
in the daily ministration” (Acts 6:1 KJV).
But thanks
to Executive
Order 13166, complaints of this sort are now a federal matter.
According to the regulations
which accompany EO 13166, every resident of the United States has
the right to be served by any government-funded program in the language
or dialect of his choice. That person (or his lawyer) is also the
sole judge of whether any particular program has met its new linguistic
obligations.
Given that
America’s poverty-plagued inner cites are home to numerous immigrants,
both legal and illegal, the probability of language complaints is
rather high. Government bureaucrats have not erred on the side of
common sense on language matters. The Department of Health and Human
Services has ordered the Maine
Medical Center to function in a minimum of nine languages at
all times — three more official tongues than the United
Nations.
Churches and
nonprofit organizations may soon find themselves haggling with hostile
lawyers over the proper translation of program materials into Urdu
or Bengali in order to receive a few dollars from the federal government.
La Casa shelter
is operated by the Coalition for the Homeless, a group which receives
federal funds, including a specific grant of $525,600 from the Department
of Housing and Urban Development. (That particular grant expired
last September.) Given these complaints by Spanish-speakers, the
Coalition for the Homeless may well find itself under federal investigation.
Even organizations
which have had no trouble complying with all sorts of federal regulations,
such as Catholic Charities USA, face a newly hostile regulatory
climate, thanks to EO 13166. Any nonprofit group which accepts federal
funds is now just one complaint by a Mandarin, Spanish, or Farsi
speaker from losing all its federal funding. (Keep in mind that
ideological opponents of any particular organization can easily
recruit “testers” to generate language discrimination complaints.)
If John DiIulio
wants to see his dream of federally funded faith-based programs
bear fruit, he would do well to encourage President Bush to repeal
EO 13166. DiIulio might also ask the Director of Health and Human
Services, Tommy Thompson, to withdraw his department's EO 13166
regulations.
So long as
EO 13166 remains on the books, the question is no longer: Can churches
accept government funds and still be true to their mission? The
question has become: Should anyone dare accept government funds
at all?
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