Bush Administration

The Supreme Court narrowly ruled today in favor of the right of habeas corpus and against a piece of the Bush Administration’s practice of curtailing civil liberties in the name of national security. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, both appointed by President Bush, joined Justices Scalia and Thomas in dissenting.

As is common, Scalia’s dissenting opinion provides a preview of the far Right’s reaction to the ruling. Scalia—one of the highest-ranking judges in the country—predicted that giving prisoners access to the judiciary is tantamount to murder:

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.

Noted by Brian Tamanaha.

In his state of the union address, President Bush called for a permanent extension of “charitable choice”—no doubt including efforts by his administration to allow faith-based groups receiving federal funding to discriminate in hiring. Reporting on the effort in Congress, the Washington Times quotes an organization taking up Bush’s charge:

A coalition of multidenominational religious groups is fighting to save the language, and the scuffle is complicating efforts in the Senate to renew the SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] law. SAMHSA funds and administers a slew of outreach and intervention programs, doling out grants to social service groups that help fight mental illness and addiction. …

"Asking faith-based organizations to ignore religion in making staffing decisions is like asking senators to disregard party affiliation and political ideology in choosing their staff, or requiring the Sierra Club or the Human Rights Campaign to ignore the political and philosophical commitments of potential staff," argued the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom in a letter to Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Enzi.

The “Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom” might sound like an organization that would be outraged when a government-funded program openly refused to hire, say, Catholics or Baptists. After all, the Religious Test clause of the Constitution prohibits the government from requiring officials to be of a certain faith, and civil rights laws protect people from religious employment discrimination at all but private religious institutions. But this group apparently defines “religious freedom” not as an individual liberty but as the right of faith-based groups to discriminate while receiving federal dollars.

In fact, this coalition’s name sounds a lot like that of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, a group of 50 religious, civil rights, and educational organizations (including PFAW) that formed in the 1990s to oppose efforts to establish state-sponsored prayer and public funding of sectarian schools—quite the opposite of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom.

CPRF is hosted by a group called the Center for Public Justice, and its members include (as of this 2004 document) the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Legal Society.

Edward Blum has long been a vocal opponent of affirmative action, having worked for anti-affirmative action groups such as the Center for Equal Opportunity, the American Civil Rights Institute, and his own Campaign for a Color-Blind America (now vanished). In recent years, however, Blum has expanded his purview to another area involving opportunities for minorities: the basic right to vote.

Kent Hill, an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, recently appeared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” to tout the efforts made by the Bush Administration’s global AIDS initiative (called PEPFAR) to fund faith-based groups and abstinence outreach.

As we’ve noted, PEPFAR provided increased funding for AIDS relief, but also came with controversial restrictions seemingly keyed to ideology, most prominently a requirement that two-thirds of money for prevention of HIV transmission—including preexisting funding channels—go to programs dedicated exclusively to promoting abstinence-until-marriage and fidelity. This anti-condom measure was seen as a sop to the Religious Right, as were grants awarded to politically-connected faith-based groups. The Center for Public Integrity has a long report on the issue.

Although there was support among aid groups for the “ABC” strategy (“Abstinence, Being Faithful, and Condoms”) in principle, the requirements heavily favoring abstinence caused confusion and program cuts for condoms and mother-child transmission prevention. Hill, however, characterizes it as “a debate as to whether behavior change is possible” which has brought “some criticism from all sides.”

Hill, a history professor and former president of Eastern Nazarene College, served from 1986-1992 as head of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a right-wing group founded to support President Reagan’s Cold War efforts in Central America, mainly by insinuating ties between the mainline National Council of Churches and communist groups or the KGB. IRD was known in the 1980s as “the official seminary of the White House” (Nation, 4/17/89, via MT).

(AP photo via Center for Public Integrity.)