I sympathize with the concern that allowing religious groups to
participate on an equal footing in funding programs may sometimes yield
a "bad deal" for the religious institutions, when the government
attaches strings that pressure the institutions to deviate from their
religious principles.
But there are two substantial arguments, I think, that point the
other way. First, it's also often a bad deal for religious institutions
when they are excluded from such funding programs, but their secular
competitors are funded. An example: The Bob Jones case illustrates
that even the normal tax exemptions for nonprofits can be used to
pressure religious institutions to change their policies (as Goldsboro
Christian Schools in fact did), since even tax exemptions can and do
come with strings attached. Yet would it really be a better deal if, in
order to supposedly protect religious institutions from such pressure,
the government were required to deny tax exemptions to religious schools
(property tax exemptions, income tax exemptions for the schools, and
income tax exemptions for donors), even when exactly the same exemptions
were available to secular schools?
Second, excluding the institutions from benefit programs may
diminish pressure on the religious institutions while increasing
pressure on religious individuals. In our current system, where the
government provides a massive subsidy to the 88% of all students who go
to secular public schools, but no subsidy to the remaining 12%
(including the 10% who go to religious schools), many parents of those
in the 88% are likely pressured to send their kids to public school even
though a public school education may be contrary to the parents'
religious beliefs. Many parents may be sincerely religiously motivated
to give their children a comprehensively religious education, as free as
possible from un-Godly influences in the curriculum and in classmates'
behavior, but when offered an effective $8000 subsidy to send their kids
to public school may feel unable to resist. Parents are thus pressured
to compromise their religious principles, in a way they wouldn't be
pressured if comparable (or even smaller) subsidies were given to all
schools, both public and private.
We see the flip side of that with the GI Bill and other programs,
such as the one in Witters. It's true that these programs may have
strings attached that pressure religious institutions into changing
their religiously motivated policies. But they help free at least some
religious college students from the pressure (caused by the massive
subsidy for public universities) to get a secular higher education
instead of a religious higher education.
Eugene
Vance Koven writes:
Scalia may of course have been thinking about places like Turkey or
controversies like the headscarf ban in France, but on the whole I think
Marc's observations about the bad deal for both church and state that is
made when subsidies and establishments are sought. None of that,
however, addresses Scalia's main point about just what "establishment"
ought to mean.
On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Marc Stern
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But based on those subsidies, the UK has forbidden
religious schools receiving government aid to tell students that
homosexual behavior is sinful (although they can teach that the church
is opposed to homosexual behavior). And under its laws regarding sexual
orientation equality, it has forbidden a Catholic school to fire a
headmaster (a lovely English term) who had a same sex partner.
Moreover, the British have at least proposed that religious schools be
required to accept a portion of students of differ faiths to avoid
religious segregation.( I don't know off hand whether the proposal was
adopted.)Thus, the question of whether the religious subsidies advance
religious freedom is more complicated than Alan's post suggests-even
before we get to the questioned of whether the nominal Christianity of
public schools in England is itself any boon to religion.
Marc Stern
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