Bush's faith based initiatives

Written by: Alan Willis on Feb 9, 2008 11:00 AM EST

The election has focused on a number of important issues; the Iraq war, education, and healthcare seem to dominate the news, blogs, and exit polls. Yet, one major issue that rarely comes up needs serious consideration: the Separation of Church and State. We need to bring this issue to the forefront because it is here—even more than with Iraq—that the Bush Administration has undone the Constitutions. The Bush administration’s Faith Based Initiatives clearly lies outside the Constitution and takes enormous amounts of money (in the billions over eight years) to support religion. We need a candidate who will put an end to this bring back the Separation of Church and State.

This violates two sections of the Constitution; though we tend to think only of the 1st Amendment clauses on religion, the Faith Based Initiatives have also violated the Article VI ban on religious tests for public office and trusts. Since Chamberlin v. Dade County Board of Public Instruction (1964) it has been generally accepted that persons paid with public (i.e.: tax) money are covered under the question of religious tests.  I admit the concurring opinion was not as explicit in this as I would have liked, but it is sufficiently clear as to indicate that people—the case involved teachers—who are paid from public funds cannot be required to pass a religious test for their position. The case built on the much more explicit Toracso v. Watkins (1961) in which a notary public was denied his commission based on a religious test in Maryland.

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In Bush’s faith based initiatives enormous amounts of public money go to organization which explicitly discriminate in hiring based on religion. I am not disputing that faith-based programs can be enormously helpful in addiction recovery—as an example—but I am denying that such initiatives should be publically funded. A counter argument may be that religiously oriented organizations have long provided some public services—and this is true. Let us take the Salvation Army as an example. The Salvation Army in New York City provided the city with a number of service, including child protective and foster care services. Prior the Bush administration, however the Salvation Army kept the accounting strictly separate and did not employ a religious test for employment; under the faith based initiatives it instituted a religious test and fired non-Christians and—of course, since these faith based initiative are a part of the religious right’s movement—gays (Michelle Goldberg, Kingdome Coming, pp. 128-132).

It is worse, even, than that. Through a system of double grants, the Bush Administration grants enormous amount of money to large, well-established evangelical organizations, which then “re-grant” the money to smaller organizations that are not as well equipped to apply for grants directly from the Federal Government.  This is a convoluted system. It allows the Office of Faith Based Initiatives to avoid responsibility for any oversight in how the money is spent, and it to say that it is the money of the larger organization to do with as the please—even if it re-granting the money to highly discriminatory organizations. It is a shell game with violates the spirit (and, I would argue, the letter) of the law when it comes to Separation of Church and State.

As a last note, I would like to say that Republicans—like Katherine Harris—who believe that the Separation of Church and State is a “myth” or a “lie” are in an interesting predicament. The Baptists—not known for their “liberalism”—who, in Colonial and early US history fought hard for and who, in the height of the Cold War touted the “wall” –and, yes, they used the word, of Separation as a distinctive feature of America’s freedom.

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