Report highlights legal wrangling over Bush’s faith-based initiatives

Posted: 12/15/06

Report highlights legal wrangling
over Bush’s faith-based initiatives

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

WASHINGTON (ABP)—In a year when President Bush’s “faith-based initiative” faced considerable public-relations challenges, it also continued to raise challenging legal and institutional questions, a new report from an independent group revealed.

Several lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of various aspects of the faith-based program have moved forward in federal and state courts, producing a significant victory for the program’s opponents.

The report, from the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, highlighted the ruling, one of the most sweeping regarding the faith-based initiative.

“As a matter of substance, the year’s most striking developments involve the role of FBOs (faith-based organizations) in the prison setting,” wrote church-state law experts Chip Lupu and Bob Tuttle in the report on the state of the law regarding government funding of religious groups.

“At least four major cases involving faith-based rehabilitation programs are pending in the federal courts. One of them … has already led to a sweeping opinion against the constitutionality of such a program, as well as a court order that the money spent on that program be returned to the state.”

Lupu and Tuttle, who both teach at George Washington University Law School, track and analyze legal aspects of the faith-based program for the Roundtable. They presented the report to journalists, government officials and others involved in the faith-based initiative during the group’s annual conference in Washington.

Lupu pointed specifically to a June ruling by a federal judge in Iowa against a Christian prisoner-rehabilitation program. The judge in Americans United v. Prison Fellowship Ministries said the government-funded program at Iowa’s Newton Correctional Facility violated the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.

The judge found that participants were coerced with living-arrangement advantages unavailable to those who did not participate in the program, that the program and the prison had no sufficient way to monitor whether government funds given to it were spent on secular or sectarian purposes, and that the program was focused on Bible study and conversion to an evangelical form of Christianity.

“I must say that that case … is a poster child for how not to set up and run a faith-based prison program,” Lupu said. “The state violated virtually every relevant constitutional norm.”

Under the Constitution, religious groups may not use direct government grants to pay for proselytizing, worship services or other clearly religious activities.

The scholars also reiterated concerns they have raised repeatedly since 2002, when they began to monitor the faith-based program.

Lupu and Tuttle have argued that the government agencies doling out grants to religious organizations are not providing sufficiently clear guidance on what sorts of activities the money may support.

Tuttle noted a report, issued in July by the independent Government Accountability Office, that identified significant weaknesses in the kind of guidance several federal agencies provide to religious grantees.

The GAO report also found deficiencies in federal agencies’ oversight of religious groups that already had received funds to ensure they did not violate constitutional standards.

Such problems, Tuttle noted, could lead to situations such as a recent case in which the Department of Health and Human Services terminated a grant to an abstinence-based sex-education program.

The program, called the Silver Ring Thing, inspired a lawsuit against HHS because the group did not adequately segregate the government funds it received from private moneys it said it used to pay for religious activities, such as school rallies where children were encouraged to follow Christ.

In a settlement HHS negotiated to end the lawsuit, the agency came up with a set of safeguards to ensure that the program would not use government funding in unconstitutional ways should it apply for, and receive, future grants.