Our tax dollars at work

If only Al Gore and Joe Lieberman had been elected, we wouldn't be facing this attempt to break down the wall of separation between church and state by giving government funds to "faith-based" charities…\nOops! My mistake. Of course Gore and Lieberman also endorsed "charitable choice" during the campaign, seeking to bring religion and government closer together. If they had won, I daresay the Democrats who are now attacking President George W. Bush's "faith-based initiative" would be defending it with pious blather about the "vacuum of values" found in a "hollow secularism."\nI don't suppose I have any insuperable objection to government contracts with faith-based services. If the organizations involved submit to appropriate external scrutiny, to ensure high levels of professionalism and accountability, plus compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws, these faith-based organizations could do good work. \nIn fact, under existing laws, some might already be doing so. But I doubt such scrutiny will either be required by Congress or tolerated by the organizations themselves. When scandal erupts, as it's bound to, that might change, either producing demands for oversight and regulation of the religious service providers, or for their replacement by secular institutions. \nIt would be nice if we could deal with the problems in advance rather than shutting the barn door after the horses have been baptized, but I know I'm dreaming. The generally low level of public debate in the United States shows no sign of rising in the 21st century.\nReligious Rightists are crowing in triumph over Bush's gag rule on abortion in federally funded women's health clinics. Why, they demand rhetorically, should their tax money go to support services they oppose on moral grounds?\nRhetorical questions are usually easier to answer than the questioners imagine. Try this: For the same reason they must subsidize religions they detest, through tax exemptions for religious groups. Those who claim to wish a return to the Constitutional principles of the founders should bear in mind that the main author of the First Amendment, James Madison, opposed tax exemption for churches. Hey, that makes me a strict constructionist.\nNotice I'm not citing my own moral reservations about subsidizing sects which oppose civil rights protection based on sexual orientation and even justify violence against gay people as a reasonable if regrettable reaction to the gay movement. (By the way, will Bush's faith-based initiative be used to fund the fraudulent "ex-gay" groups, which claim a basis in psychiatry as much as in religion?) \nMy point is that right-wing Christians are already subsidizing their religious competitors, whose distasteful practices range from idolatry to sex education and toleration of contraceptive use by married couples -- in some cases to ordaining homosexuals or even women to the ministry, in flagrant violation of Biblical principles.\nReligious believers who really object to seeing their tax dollars fund abortions can always do what some pacifists do: They can refuse to pay all or part of their taxes, withholding that portion which might otherwise go to an abortion clinic. That would give them the moral equivalence with the civil rights movement that they already seek to claim. \nThe government is not a fast-food restaurant, where you can select from a menu what you will pay for. Even at the local level, we must get along with people whose values we detest and recognize that our government serves them no less than it serves us. \nBut that, I fear, is exactly what is not recognized by those who want to make religion more visible in the public sphere, be they "conservative" or "liberal." (Yes, there's a Religious Left, exemplified by folks like Jim Wallis and Cornel West, and I'm just as wary of them as I am of Ralph Reed and James F. Dobson.) \nAs Ellen Willis writes in The Nation this week, "Pro-church militants presume the right to attack secularists' world view while feeling entitled to unquestioned 'respect' for their own." Religion in the public sphere should be subject to the same jaundiced scrutiny as any other ideology.