Opinion: Taking faith to a fault

President Bush is so intent on sending federal tax dollars to religious organizations involved in charity work that he bypassed Congress last week and signed an executive order allowing church groups to receive public monies even if they maintain discriminatory hiring practices.

Spreading money to faith-based social services has been a priority for the president since taking office. Bush credits his faith for helping him to stop drinking alcohol. He wants to share what worked for him with other Americans by engaging religious groups in addressing the problems of drug addiction, alcoholism and welfare dependency, among others.

The problem is, the president has shown no compunction about dismantling church-state separation protections to realize his vision. While there is no Establishment Clause or church-state separation concern when organizations such as the Salvation Army receive public money to perform social service work in a secular manner, that is not what the president wants. He is actively working to eliminate the need for religious groups to secularize their social service operations in order to receive government funds. In announcing his executive order, he said: "If a charity is helping the needy, it should not matter if there is . . . a cross or a crescent on the wall, or a religious commitment in the charter."

Although the executive order pays lip service to barring public money from going to underwrite prayer or worship services, enforcement on that point is lacking.

In an earlier Bush order, five offices of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives were established in government agencies. (The latest executive order raises this total to seven.) The Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services recently awarded a $500,000 government grant (with the potential for another $1-million) to Pat Robertson's charitable group, Operation Blessing. The grant came from a $30-million HHS grantmaking program titled the "Compassion Capital Fund." Robertson's group and other religiously affiliated organizations will be used as "intermediaries," and in turn will dole out subgrants to other faith-based and community charities of their choice.

A conference in New Orleans in May sponsored by the Administration of Children and Families, part of HHS, was so infused with religion, an observer described it as more tent revival than government function. ACF's own gospel choir opened the proceedings. The gathering featured one speaker from Colorado Springs who described the strategy of her welfare-to-work program, funded in part by the government: to have church mentors pray with welfare recipients for much of the first six months.

Regardless of one's view on the value of religion-based programs and the separation of church and state, the Bush administration's arrogance should be troubling. Congress has been debating legislation on the president's faith-based initiative for more than a year. Now, because the president has run out of patience or is concerned that even the new, Republican-controlled Congress won't go as far as he would like, he has unilaterally used his executive authority to bypass the legislative process.

Jim Towey, the director of the White House faith-based office and former secretary of Florida's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, promised when he took office in February he wouldn't allow tax dollars to subsidize prayer. But now he's an administration apologist. While affirming that no government funds will go for indoctrination, Towey, in a conference call, readily boasted of a Philadelphia program in which adult church members bring the children of imprisoned parents to religious services.

Towey also defends the president's decision to allow federal funds to flow to religious groups that discriminate in hiring. He says churches, synagogues and mosques have a constitutional right to reject employees from other religions or those who don't uphold the religion's moral standards, such as gays and lesbians. While that is true, the government shouldn't be underwriting exclusionary practices. Legal principles stretching back to 1941 bar the federal government from giving money to discriminatory organizations. But the president is even willing to set this noble ethic aside. His religious fervor is no doubt genuine, but his policies show a lack of respect for the religious -- and constitutional -- principles of millions of other Americans.

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