Programs are designed to ease poverty, hunger

By ANDREA LAFFERTY
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- The Freedom from Religion Foundation, an atheist organization, went before the Supreme Court in late February to argue that the Bush administration's acceptance of faith-based charities is a threat to religious liberty.
Up until now, groups like the Wisconsin-based FRF have been able to charge into court at the first mention of religion in the public square and find a judge who would banish a creche or muzzle a prayer. And too often, activities by this organization and the American Civil Liberties Union have had a chilling effect on religious expression colder than any wintry midnight in Green Bay.
Until recently, the way to achieve the concept of "fair and balanced" in federal spending was to exclude any person or organization with a religious affiliation. The church down the street's model program for the homeless had to watch as precious public resources were showered on inefficient and ineffective bloated bureaucracies.
Doing good
The Bush administration looked at this and decided the money should go where it can do a community the most good. No one should have to pray or convert to get a hot meal or a bed for the night, but the faith-based motivation of service-providers stretches a buck much further than that of many secular charities approved by bureaucrats.
The fact that religious people are no longer being excluded from consideration for federal charitable funding, of course, is extremely alarming to the FRF and its allies.
The Supreme Court is looking at a very narrow issue that the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives violated government neutrality on religion by holding national and regional conferences where it consulted with religious-affiliated groups about social problems.
There is an extensive amount of huffing and puffing about "separation of church and state" which really is liberalese for "we're inclusive about everything except God and those who believe in Him."
I am not a lawyer but Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice is and he has filed an excellent brief in this case making it clear that the Bush administration's faith-based programs are constitutionally permissible.
The U.S. solicitor general agrees, making the point in a brief filed for the administration that the FRF's interest in "ensuring that executive branch officials comport their speech and conduct their meetings in compliance with its view of the Establishment Clause (of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) has no distinct historical grounding or status.
"Should Americans be forced to continue to hand a federal charitable dollar to a long line of government or even private "charity" conglomerates when a group of church people are providing better service for a fraction of the cost of the conglomerate?" he asks.
Feed the hungry
Of course, the flip side of that is do we want to continue to tell religious Americans that they should feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless, but deny them the public support for such activity because they are somehow "tainted" by their faith in God?
The late Justice William Brennan said it well. "The Establishment Clause does not license government to treat religion and those who teach or practice it, simply by virtue of their status as such, as subversive of American ideals and therefore subject to unique disabilities."
The truth of the matter is that -- federal support or not -- religious Americans will continue to do the good they do even if our government continues to treat them like people with a lower class of citizenship. They will do it because of an earlier ruling to "Love one another" by an authority more supreme than the most Supreme Court.
Andrea Lafferty is the executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, Washington, D.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.