“Why in the world would the separation of church and state have to lead to children with scraped knees? ... practically speaking, that’s the issue.”Recall that the State of Missouri had refused to include religious schools in a program to provide a rubber surface made from recycled tires for school playgrounds – thus the reference to scraped knees. Under the program the state reimbursed public and private schools for the cost of this improvement, but Missouri’s constitution forbid it from making direct payments to religiously affiliated institutions, stating: “No money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.”
The church and its supporters have argued that a rubberized surface does not, in itself, promote religion, so – despite the state’s constitution – this discrimination against a church school is unjustified, and indeed violates the U.S. Constitution, constituting an infringement on freedom of religion. But it could be argued (although no one to my knowledge has) that, since money is fungible, a payment for playground improvements made by the state frees up church resources to fund its religious activities. Another clause of the Missouri Constitution reads,
“That no person can be compelled to erect, support or attend any place or system of worship, or to maintain or support any priest, minister, preacher or teacher of any sect, church, creed or denomination of religion....”But using tax dollars to indirectly fund a church in this way would do just that, it could be argued.
If this argument seems familiar it may be because Dr. Mohler recently celebrated passage of a bill allowing states to defund Planned Parenthood based on the same reasoning. You might ask,
“Why in the world would opposition to abortion have to lead to women being deprived of birth control pills, STD tests and clinical breast exams from their preferred health care providers? Practically speaking, that’s the issue.”After all, the funding proposed for elimination was never used for abortions – it was “neutral” in that respect – so why should funding for these other services be affected by the abortion issue?
As Dr. Mohler argued explicitly on April 14, the funds reimbursed to Planned Parenthood for non-abortion-related services nevertheless “gave institutional support with taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood,” whose whole purpose for existence, Dr. Mohler frequently and vehemently affirms, is to perform abortions. Therefore, the argument goes, all government funding to Planned Parenthood should be eliminated.
Likewise, the whole reason for the existence of religious schools is to promote their religion. If Planned Parenthood can be deprived of non-abortion-related funds because those funds support an abortion-related institution, and thus indirectly support abortion, then religious schools should be able to be deprived of non-religion-related funding because such funding provides indirect support for the institutions’ religious mission.
A related argument for cutting off Planned Parenthood is that taxpayers whose religion forbids them from supporting abortion in any way should not be forced to pay taxes which are used to support an institution like Planned Parenthood which participates in abortion, even though the funds were being paid out for neutral, purely health-related purposes.
The same argument can be used to protect non-religious people or people of other religions or sects from being forced to pay for the promotion of a religion they do not believe in, even if the payments are made for something as harmless as the prevention of scraped knees – or, for that matter, to fund non-religious studies at religious schools. Because, practically speaking, scraped knees or courses in chemistry are not the issue at all. The issue is whether anyone can be forced to pay – directly or indirectly – to support institutions devoted to the promulgation of a religion they believe to be false.
Dr. Mohler and George Will make much hay over “Blaine amendments” (which, like Missouri’s constitution, prohibited public funds from going to religious sects), associating them with anti-Catholic bigotry. But the notion that citizens should not be taxed to support religious institutions was arguably part of the original meaning of the establishment clause, going back to Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, a forerunner of the First Amendment, which stated, “That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.” Even if Blaine amendments originated during a period of anti-Catholic prejudice, it does not follow that the amendments themselves were illegitimate. Even if it is true that public schools at the time conducted Protestant prayers, Blaine’s amendment did not simply express Protestants’ resentment against “Catholic immigrants founding parochial schools,” as George Will says, it expressed their refusal to pay for them, and this was solidly in the Jeffersonian tradition. Sometimes we don’t see a wrong we are doing ourselves until it is done to us (and even then we may still fail to see our own).
I was brought up in a Jewish household. I went to Hebrew school and Sunday school. Later, Jewish day schools appeared in our community, although I never attended one. All these were paid for by the Jewish community. I remember my father opposed state funding for Catholic schools. It wasn’t because he had any animus toward Catholics. But our government belonged to everybody, including us, and Jews did not want to support the training of Catholics as Catholics. If Catholics wanted to train little Catholics – or Lutherans little Lutherans – they should do so on their own dime. (Jews felt the same way about Christian prayers in public schools.) Recently, with the growth of Jewish day schools and the breakdown of the church/state barrier under the rubric of “school choice”, some Jewish organizations have abandoned their long-held opposition to public funding for parochial schools. Others, like the Anti-Defamation League, continue to hold the line.
Dr. Mohler, following George Will, denigrates the Blaine amendments as the product of a period of anti-Catholic animus, “a bit of 19th-century bigotry” in Will’s words. Now, Mohler says, “the divide is very different. It’s no longer Protestant versus Catholic, it is rather secularists versus the defenders of religious liberty,” where by “secularists” he means what he calls “the secular left” – that is, the other side in the culture wars. But I think this gets the history of this issue wrong, along with the relevant meanings of secularism and religious liberty.
The model of the Blaine amendments, namely the law that Jefferson penned proclaiming “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” was called, after all, the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. Secularism, in this sense – observance of a wall of separation between church and state (in Jefferson’s words) – was considered to be an essential bulwark of religious liberty, not its enemy. The Protestant/Catholic conflict which gave rise to the Blaine amendments was only one more chapter in a long saga. In Virginia, the conflict to which Jefferson’s statue put an end was between Anglicans on one side, Presbyterians and Baptists on the other. In fact (as explained here) the statute was only passed after a law establishing a tax supporting all Christian sects (which was intended to be a moderate compromise ) was vehemently opposed by Christian dissenters, including Baptists. Church goers of non-majority churches chose religious liberty by separation of church and state over government funding of their churches.
The issue in the current case is not between enemies and defenders of religious liberty. The issue is how best to strike a balance between the religious liberty of a church school seeking public funding and the religious liberty of taxpayers who don’t share its faith.
During oral arguments in this case Justice Kagan, defending the religious liberty of the school, said,
There's a constitutional principle. It's as strong as any constitutional principle that there is, that when we have a program of funding -- and here we're funding playground surfaces -- that everybody is entitled to that funding ... whether or not they exercise a constitutional right; in other words, here, whether or not they are a religious institution doing religious things.It is the current law of the land that women have a constitutional right to abortion, and Planned Parenthood has a constitutional right to perform them. So if Justice Kagan is correct, then defunding Planned Parenthood for performing non-abortion-related health services, on the sole basis that it is exercising its constitutional right to perform abortions, violates a strong constitutional principle just as surely as refusal to fund Trinity Lutheran does.
If Trinity Lutheran wins, then any bill defunding Planned Parenthood because it provides abortions should fail.
No comments:
Post a Comment