Another barrier between church and state is breached

Having failed to convince Congress that his plan to funnel federal money to faith-based charities was worthy of their support, President Bush resorted to an executive order to get his way.
His order calls for "equal treatment" of faith-based charities that are competing for federal funds, which sounds fair enough. But in this case "equal treatment" for some charitable institutions means that federal tax dollars will be funneled to church groups that maintain their right to treat people unequally.
If a church wants to hire only persons of its own religion, it should be free to do so -- when it is spending its own money. It should not be free to do so when it is spending the public's money. Yet under the guise of "equal treatment," that is exactly what churches will be able to do now.
Their word, their money
Likewise, if a religious institution wants to use the Bible or Koran as the basis for a program to help a drug addict, alcoholic, deadbeat or chronic under-achiever, it should be free to do so -- on its dime. It should not get to use a Catholic's tax dollars to subsidize Muslim proselytizing or a Jew's taxes to espouse the rightness of a fundamentalist Christian philosophy.
Bush said at a White House conference, "government can and should support social services provided by religious people." And government has in the past, but it demanded that there be a firewall to prevent tax money from being used to subsidize the propagation of a particular faith. With the stroke of a pen, President Bush has poked a hole in that firewall.
Religious organizations have always been free to help the less fortunate and to spread the holy word as they see it. But they had to use their money.
What the president's executive order does is allow the U.S. government to subsidize specific religious organizations, and that is a dangerous thing.
If there was ever a time when it should be clear that religion and government don't mix it is now. Al-Qaida was supplied its soldiers through a system of schools and charitable organizations that operated under an umbrella of Islamic fundamentalism. That model provides a textbook example for why Thomas Jefferson argued for a wall of separation between church and state.