Faith-Based Discrimination

     In his op-ed column in today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof derided the snobby, sneering, snooty, secular liberals who dare to criticize faith-based organizations that provide extensive aid to poor and suffering people around the globe. Kristof is impressed that the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization is now a Christian evangelical organization rather than any secular group. He generously forgives conservative Christian groups their late arrival on the social aid scene after years of over-focusing on sexual morality and homophobia rather than the needy.
     Kristof's piece coincides with the recent release of a report by President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships about the new administration's attitude toward faith-based organizations. Kristof, President Obama and the Council all ignored the most important topic, namely the constitutionality of religion-based employment decisions regarding jobs partially or fully subsidized by federal funds. Kristof is satisfied with federal funding of evangelical organizations because they no longer offer aid to entice converts. 
     The First Amendment requires much more than Kristof's minimal standard. Tax dollars should not be given to religious groups that, by hiring on religious grounds, are free to discriminate on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation. 

Texas Needs Gay Divorce...and Marriage

After a state district judge granted a divorce to a lesbian couple, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott went to court last week to try to stop the divorce decree from taking effect. The women were legally married in Massachusetts and now desire to end their union. Abbott argued that because gay marriage is illegal in Texas gay divorce is also prohibited. Abbott’s actions confirm the need for gay marriage to become legal in all states under federal constitutional law.

Opposition to gay marriage is usually expressed in religious terms. Even President Obama says he opposes gay marriage for religious reasons: “for me as a Christian ... it is also a sacred union. God's in the mix.” The president’s religious argument against marriage equality is surprising, given that his own parents’ interracial marriage was illegal in many states until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment protect the right to marry across races.

The Christian Framers Were Too Smart to Found a Christian Nation

Our Texas debates about the place of religion in the public school curriculum were featured in the cover story of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Some Christian Texans want the public schools to teach that the Christian Founders established a Christian nation and to rebut the aggressive, secular, liberal agenda that claims otherwise.

If the Founders really intended to create a Christian nation, they went about it in a strangely ineffective and incoherent way. First they wrote Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, stating “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” That idea was radical for its time. It explicitly rejected the old model of the Christian states of Europe from which so many early American had fled. Later the Framers added the antiestablishment clause to the First Amendment, which begins “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The brilliant drafters of the Constitution could easily have chosen different language if they intended to create a Christian nation. Instead they chose to build a political and legal system that was not based on religion.

The Texas Christian activists want schoolchildren to learn that because the Founders were Christians, they founded a Christian nation. Instead the activists should emulate the Founders, many of whom were devout Christians who recognized that liberty is best served by keeping religion out of government.

Health Care, Patrick and Jack

2010 offers voters the opportunity to make a New Election Year’s Resolution to fire the politicians who legislated their churches’ beliefs instead of constitutional principles. Among the top ten church-state stories of 2009 was the U.S. Catholic bishops’ successful interference in health care reform. The bishops lobbied energetically to limit insurance coverage for abortion, and, citing the bishops, House Democrats voted for restrictive legislation. The bishops then criticized the Senate for not going far enough to limit abortion funding. Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin asked Representative Patrick Kennedy to stop taking communion because he did not vote as the church requested.

The politicians who obeyed the church’s directives should reconsider their obligations. Patrick’s uncle, President Kennedy, famously expressed his belief “in an America where ... no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, ... where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.”

John Kennedy’s words eloquently captured the Constitution’s ideal that Americans are ruled by law, not religion. The reasoning behind that standard is simple: Americans do not share Catholicism or any other religion. They must be governed by common law. It is wrong to impose the Catholic or any other faith on American citizens through force of law.

On the subject of abortion, the conflict between religious and legal values is especially clear. The Catholic Church does not support women's equality. The U.S. Constitution does. President Kennedy promised to resign if faced with a similar conflict between his faith and his oath of office. He knew it was unacceptable to impose his faith on the nation. Politicians must reclaim the Kennedy ideal and resign if they feel they must follow their faith. If they do not resign, voters should rise up and toss out of office politicians who obey their churches’ orders instead of their oath to the Constitution. America is not a place where public officials should either request or accept instructions on public policy from the pope and bishops.