By Bob Allen
A federal judge ruled May 2 that a Baptist child-care agency at the center of a long-running legal dispute between Kentucky lawmakers and citizens represented by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and state cannot block a settlement of the lawsuit agreed upon by the involved parties March 12.
Sunrise Children’s Services, formerly known as Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, claimed settlement of the 13-year-old lawsuit over taxpayer funding of religious organizations would burden the Kentucky Baptist Convention agency with requirements not placed on other providers of social services that contract with the state.
U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson, however, ruled that nothing in the settlement prevents future litigation to resolve any remaining First Amendment claims. A portion of the settlement that requires specific monitoring of Sunrise Children’s Services for compliance is something that would be voluntarily assumed if the agency chooses to enter into future contracts with the Commonwealth.
The long-running dispute started in 1998 when Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children fired a therapist and residential counselor named Alicia Pedreira after discovering that she was a lesbian.
Pedreira lost a discrimination claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A separate claim joined by Kentucky taxpayers, including a former Southern Baptist seminary professor, however, argued that financing agencies that discriminate against gay employees and teach children sectarian beliefs violates the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.
A U.S. district court in Louisville dismissed the lawsuit in 2008, but the following year the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the ruling and reinstated the Establishment Clause claim.
A second amended complaint filed in 2012 objected to “the receipt and use of taxpayer funds by KBHC in light of the fact that it is pervasively sectarian and the fact that it uses taxpayer dollars for religious indoctrination.”
Plaintiffs joining Pedreira included Paul Simmons, an ordained Baptist minister who taught Christian Ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for 23 years before taking early retirement in 1992.
Kentucky agreed in the settlement to change its child-care system to ensure that faith-based groups that contract with the state do not pressure children in their care to participate in religious services, and that they give religious materials only to those who want them.
Sunrise denies that religious coercion takes place in its homes and claims that reimbursements from the government, given to Sunrise for secular services it provides to children who are wards of the Commonwealth, do not violate the First Amendment ban on establishment of religion by the government.
Sunrise says losing access to state funding would drastically curtail services it provides to nearly 2,000 children each year.
Previous stories: