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Bush's church-state mess takes liberties with ours

By ROBYN BLUMNER
Published July 1, 2007

When President Bush finally leaves office in January 2009, he will leave behind many legacies. One will be a nation stripped of its moral bearings. Where once we did not torture and were a nation of laws, that is no longer true. Bush will also leave us in far reduced international standing and with a disabled military. And he will leave an exhausted treasury with a national debt of many trillions of dollars more than he found it.

In additional to all that, Bush will leave us with a system of church-state entanglements on an epic scale. By pouring billions of dollars into religiously affiliated social service providers, Bush will have accomplished precisely what the nation's founders warned against: a process by which people of many faiths and none at all are forced through compulsory taxation to underwrite other people's religious activities.

A group of freethinkers called the Freedom from Religion Foundation based in Wisconsin took action against the administration's faith-based policies. The foundation and three leaders of FFRF, as taxpayers, sued the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives as well as the heads of eight additional faith-based offices - all created by Bush through executive fiat. The suit alleged that these agencies were using tax dollars to advance and promote religion.

It is pretty clear that the faith-based agenda of the Bush administration has been to do precisely what FFRF alleges. The regional conferences that the faith-based offices hold have had the feel of revival meetings where participants have been so whipped up they've been known to speak in tongues.

The Government Accountability Office issued a report in 2006 finding that the faith-based recipients of federal grants are not sufficiently policed to ensure that they don't discriminate in their services on the basis of religion. It found that some grantees engage in overtly religious activities, such as praying, while providing government-funded social services.

The suit could have put all the unconstitutional activities of the administration's faith-based agencies under a microscope. But first the litigants had to get past the Bush-packed U.S. Supreme Court. Something they could not do.

Lost in all the attention that other end-of-term cases received, Hein vs. Freedom from Religion Foundation Inc. was as momentous as any. The 5-4 ruling with the majority consisting of the conservatives on the court, including Bush's two appointees, will help insulate Bush's faith-based agenda from legitimate legal challenge. The justices kicked FFRF out of court as well as any taxpayer who wants to object to executive branch expenditures on religious activities. They said that taxpayers don't have standing to sue.

The notion of standing is grounded in the limited jurisdiction of our nation's federal courts. Only where a litigant suffers a cognizable injury may a suit be brought. This keeps the courts from postulating on hypothetical harms.

In general, taxpayers do not have standing to sue the federal government when they object to the way their tax money is used. The injury is considered too amorphous. But nearly 40 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Establishment Clause, our guarantees of church-state separation, is different. The high court noted that there are deep historical roots associated with the injury inflicted when citizens are forced to support church activities and beliefs they do not share.

James Madison's famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments declared that no government in a free society may "force a citizen to contribute 3 pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment" of religion.

Being compelled to support others' faith was a wrong that the founders well understood. To them, the religious wars and mass slaughter that came in the wake of the Reformation were relatively fresh. Some had progenitors who were part of the migration from Europe escaping religious tyranny. They also saw the way minority religious groups in the colonies such as Quakers and Baptists chafed at state-collected religious taxes.

For this unique and historically portentous harm, the court in 1968 granted aggrieved taxpayers the ability to get into court and object.

But the court in 2007 has shut the courthouse door with a slam. The majority made some nonsensical distinction between the 1968 case that involved a congressional appropriation, and the fact that FFRF was seeking to challenge a discretionary expenditure of the executive branch. The four-member dissent accurately summed up the distinction as lacking any basis in "logic or precedent."

There is now a four-member conservative plurality of the Roberts court that is openly hostile toward those who seek to keep their tax money from flowing into religious coffers. The dismantled wall between church and state will be just another one of Bush's disastrous legacies.

[Last modified July 1, 2007, 02:03:07]