By Bob Allen
A long-running legal battle over taxpayer funding of a Baptist children’s home in Kentucky may have ended with a March 12 settlement of a 13-year-old lawsuit filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the ACLU.
Kentucky’s government agreed 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.
The dispute started in 1998 when Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children – now known as Sunrise Children’s Services – 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. He went on to teach medical ethics at the University of Louisville.
Simmons, who in his later years at Southern became controversial with the seminary’s conservative trustees for his liberal views on abortion and homosexuality, is a former board member of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and president of the group’s Louisville chapter.
Along with protecting against religious coercion, the settlement requires that prior to placing a child with a religiously affiliated child-care agency or foster home, the state will inform children and parents of the provider’s religious affiliation. If the child or parent objects, the state must, when possible, provide an alternative placement.
“We are pleased with this settlement,” said Alex Luchenitser, AU’s associate legal director. “It will ensure that vulnerable youths in Kentucky’s child-care system are free to follow and practice their own faiths, or no faith at all, and that no religion is forced upon them.”
Daniel Mach of the ACLU’s program on freedom of religion and belief said the agreement “promotes the basic constitutional principle that taxpayer funds should never be used to underwrite religious indoctrination.”
A Sunrise spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Established to address needs at the end of the Civil War, Sunrise Children’s Services opened in 1869 as the Louisville Baptist Orphans Home. It is an agency of the Kentucky Baptist Convention and the state’s largest private child-care provider, offering a network of residential programs across the state as well as family foster care and treatment for mental health.
About 60 percent of the agency’s annual $23 million income is reimbursements for services contracted with the state. Without state funding, Sunrise President Bill Smithwick told the Western Recorder in 2008, the agency would be able to help only a fraction of the nearly 2,000 children who benefit from its services each year.
According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, the tentative agreement won’t be finalized until a formal drafting of state policies and a judge’s approval.
Previous stories:
Suit fights tax funding of Baptist home
Supreme Court permits taxpayer challenge to funding of Baptist home
Lesbian fired by Baptist agency to get day in court
Groups ask federal appeals court to halt Kentucky’s funding of Baptist agency