WASHINGTON (ABP) — A federal judge has dismissed the most sweeping portions of a lawsuit that challenged President Bush's faith-based initiative as unconstitutional.
On Nov. 16, Judge John Shabaz of the U. S. District Court of Western Wisconsin dismissed most of the claims in Freedom From Religion Foundation vs. Towey, the suit filed in June by the Wisconsin-based foundation. It launched a broad assault on the philosophy and specifics of Bush's program to provide more government funding to churches and other religious charities for social services.
A few days before Shabaz's ruling, the Freedom From Religion Foundation voluntarily narrowed the scope of the lawsuit to two programs funded through grants from the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
The suit originally claimed that Jim Towey, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and other administration officials violated the First Amendment's ban on government endorsement of religion “by using federal taxpayer appropriations to support activities that endorse religion and give faith-based organizations preferred positions as political insiders.”
The complaint cited speeches given at the dozens of conferences for providers of faith-based social services that the White House has hosted in various parts of the country.
It also claimed the agencies showed favoritism toward religion by providing “capacity- building” assistance to churches and other religious groups to enable them to better compete with secular groups for government grants. And the complaint said the guidelines the administration provides to religious service providers — that they may not use government funds for “inherently religious” activities — are insufficient to prevent public funds from subsidizing ostensibly “secular” services that are pervaded by religious components.
But Shabaz ruled the Wisconsin group, which has about 5,000 members and advocates for strict church-state separation, does not have standing to challenge the perceived violations of the First Amendment by the executive branch.
The result of the ruling “is that the complaint has been narrowed to two particular federal grants made by the Department of Health and Human Services — and, at least for now, has been reduced to a small thorn in the [faith-based] initiative's side rather than the large threat it initially appeared to be,” according to a legal analysis by George Washington University law professors Chip Lupu and Bob Tuttle. The two have been tracking the lawsuit and other legal developments involving the faith-based initiative for the non-partisan Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy.