WASHINGTON (ABP) — A federal agency has withdrawn funding from an abstinence program that is part of President Bush's “faith-based initiative,” saying it does not have proper safeguards in place to avoid direct government support of religion.
In a letter received Aug. 22, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services informed leaders of the “Silver Ring Thing” program that it was stopping payment on a $75,000 grant.
The abstinence-only sex-ed program bills itself as an “evangelistic ministry” and gives teenagers silver rings inscribed with a Bible passage.
Harry Wilson, an official in the department's family and youth services bureau, told the program's leader that “it appears” that the program funded with the HHS grant “includes both secular and religious components that are not adequately separated.”
In the letter, Wilson also asked Silver Ring Thing officials to submit a plan for remedying the problem to the bureau by Sept. 6.
The Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal Department of Health and Human Services May 16 to stop funding of the Silver Ring Thing.
ACLU lawyers said the program violates the Constitution's ban on government establishment of religion.
According to court papers, the program has received more than $1 million in federal funding in the past three years. Also known as the John Guest Evangelistic Team, the group's newsletter said the program's mission is to “call our world to Christ,” and that one way to do that is “to saturate the United States with a generation of young people who have taken a vow of sexual abstinence until marriage and put on the silver ring. This mission can only be achieved by offering a personal relationship with Jesus Christ….”
At the end of the group's presentations, students are encouraged to wear a silver ring inscribed with “I Thess. 4:3-4.” The passage, from the apostle Paul's first letter to the ancient church at Thessalonica, encourages Christians to avoid sexual sin.
The suit also says participants in the ring programs are encouraged to accept Jesus Christ as their savior.
“Both because the federal funding of the Silver Ring Thing constitutes a direct government grant to a pervasively sectarian institution and because the federal dollars are demonstrably underwriting religious activities and religious content, the funding violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the lawsuit says.
Denny Pattyn, Silver Ring Thing's founder and president, noted Aug. 24 that the letter said the suspension of funds was due to a lack of evidence of safeguards, rather than a clear violation of the First Amendment.
“We have separated the [program's religious and secular] activities, and we have not misspent federal dollars,” Pattyn said, in a telephone interview from the group's Moon Township, Pa., offices. “In the meantime, they've suspended the funding until we look at these points and clear up — and make it clearer that we do, in fact, separate.”