In God’s Name (2)

And now I continue focusing on a recent series of articles in the New York Times about how religious organizations are getting benefits from the government.

Thing is, religious organizations are not just getting regulatory and tax exemptions, some which have been in place for decades. Recently they have become eligible for an increasing flow of federal grants and contracts issued from the state and federal governments.

This did not happen on George Bush’s watch. This started back in 1996 with Bill Clinton. What George did was give it greater force, which the administration call the Faith Based Initiative.

What is interesting is how this increasing weave of regulatory and tax exemptions has gone largely unnoticed. Over the past while, religious leaders and politicians are focused and focusing the press on other issues like the public display of religious icons. A good example is showing the Ten Commandments.

And what I find curious is the rhetoric that is coming out from these leaders. All too often they say that religious groups in America are targets of antagonism, not favouritism. One example is from the House Speaker J. Denis Hastert from Illinois. When introducing a legislative agenda in July, he said:

Radical courts have attempted to gut our religious freedom and redefine the value system on which America was built.

Then there was a conference called The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006 in Washington in March. There Tom DeLay is quoted telling the crowd that society:

treats Christianity like a second-class superstition. Seen from that perspective, of course there is a war on religion.

Now back to Alabama for a moment. When the argument that religious groups are victims of discrimination, Ms. White sighed. Thing is, she is finding it harder to compete with unlicensed faith-based centres that don’t have to comply with expensive licensing requirements and regulations.

Lets jump to the other side of the point, to the Harvest Temple Church of God. Paston Fuson says that the busy church-based centre, next to the sanctuary covers its costs and helps support the work of the church. He is quoted as saying:

We have talked about getting licensed before in the past, but it would cost us quite a bit of money.

He points out that the staff would be probably large enough to meet state standard but the centre would need costly renovations to upgrade the facility.

That made me stop and go “Huh?” Be it here or in the States, the requirements for day care centres are strict. They have to comply to everything, including the specific toys required for each age group. And there is a reason for these regulations: the security of young lives. But if it would be too costly to renovate the facility, what does that say?

The main problem is broached by Ms. White. The state funds day care centres and the resources are limited. So it seems unfair that subsidies are available to unlicensed centres as well as the licensed ones. Shouldn’t the financing and licensing be universal? We are talking about the safety of children here.

But in Alabama, some churches have voluntarily obtained licenses. In Huntsville, the First Christian Church has a fully licensed day care centre. The pastor of the church, Paul B. Koch Jr thinks it is appropriate and raises the quality of care. But he also says:

But the Christian Coalition is still strong in Alabama and this is an issue for them.

Of course, we need the Christian Coalition to jump in here. John W. Giles, the president of Alabama’s “chapter” confirmed that his organization supported the exemption. He noted that state oversight would be intrusive and was unnecessary because:

because the pastors and congregations are your quality control.

When I read this I just flipped. You don’t need quality control because the pastor and congregation are your quality control??? What planet does this man come from?

I think back to the scandal with the Catholic church and the young people who were abused by the priests. Here in Canada we have also had problems with institutes run by the Church.

One of the major incidents was the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Yet there were many other reports of other Church run facilities. Here is part of a report:

I saw many young children beaten up and strapped. I saw Brother --- wake up young children and take them to a room to sexually assault them. I saw children handcuffed to a pillar in the basement. They would be pushed and kicked. I saw Brother --- use a pool table stick to hit children if they would not have anal sex with him. Children were given cold showers then strapped. If I told any Brothers that another Brother tried to have sex with me, I would be strapped." [From a report on abuse at St. Joseph's and St. John's Training School for Boys]

The society had put their trust in these institutions. The people believed that they were doing God’s work and no quality control was necessary. And look at what happened.

Now, I am not saying this is happening in places in Huntsville or at the Harvest Temple, but the idea that these unlicensed centres have the appropriate quality control because of the people and the pastors is just inane.

Although many of the unlicensed centres are run by Protestant churches, the exemption covers all faiths, from an Islamic preschool program in Huntsville to a Catholic parish centre in Tuscaloosa. Each faith brings in different rules to the centres. Some strict faiths may institute “spare the rod, spoil the child” as an appropriate method of disciplining the children. And because they are not covered by a general, universal set of criterion, who can stop them? Certainly not the government.

Many of these centres are regulated internally. A good example is in Texas. In 1997, Governor George Bush pushed through legislation that exempted faith-based day care centres and addiction treatment programs from state licensing. He allowed them to be monitored instead by private associations controlled by pastors, program directors and other private citizens.

But who are these associations answerable to? I understand the government can be a pain to work with, and things can fall through the cracks, but people can work through the system to find someone who is answerable. A nebulous association does not have to answer to anyone.
What is interesting is that George enacted other laws steering more state financing to these “alternately accredited” institutions. Yet:

Fewer than a dozen child care centres and about 130 addiction treatment programs took advantage of this new alternative, according to subsequent studies. But several of these later became the focus of state investigations into complaints of physical abuse. A study by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, a nonprofit research organization that opposed the faith-based initiatives, found that “the rate of confirmed cases of abuse and neglect at alternatively accredited facilities in Texas is more than 10 times that of state-licensed facilities.”

So the self-policing by the private associations does not seem to work, in Texas that is. Again, we should not paint the whole situation with a wide brush but it has to make people stop and think.

The New York Times asked two leading First Amendment scholars, about faith-based day care licensing exemptions like these. Both were unfamiliar with the practice but though it sounded legally dubious.

Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University and the co-director of legal research for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, an independent project of the Rockefeller Institute of Government said:

I think what you describe is unconstitutional.

Professor Witte, the director of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, responded in an email and said that he:

would frankly be surprised to find even this Supreme Court going that far.

But the courts are going that far. When a group of licensed day care centres challenged the Alabama law in a federal court in mid-2001, guess what? They lost. They argued that the law deprived them of their constitutional right to equal protection before the law.

Well, Judge Myron H. Thompson of United States District Court, who ruled on the case, did not see it that way. He

said the state could have adopted the arrangement to avoid church-state entanglements or simply to accommodate the free exercise of religion. Indeed, he cited four other federal cases, all decided since 1988, that had upheld similar exemptions for day care centers in other states.

And the New York Times concludes this section of the article with:

In Judge Thompson’s view, it is “well settled” constitutional law that “the possible economic inequalities that might result from religious exemptions such as day care licensing exemptions” are not a violation of anyone’s equal-protection rights.

That is it for today. Tomorrow we get into aspects like exemptions from zoning rules.