My big fat GOP wedding: Bush administration marriage grants seek to wed church and state in unholy matrimony

Church & State, Feb 2003 by Boston, Rob

In July, a federal court ordered the state to stop funding programs that "convey religious messages or otherwise advance religion in any way."

Dan Richey, coordinator of the state's abstinence education program, insisted that groups that received the tax funds had been told not to use it to promote religion. But staffers at the ACLU used freedom-of-information laws to get copies of proposals submitted by religious groups that clearly outlined religious activities.

"In our lawsuit challenging the Louisiana Governor's Program on Abstinence's religious use of government funds, we came across numerous examples ranging from discussions of the virgin birth [of Jesus] to purchasing Bibles to prayer vigils at abortion clinics," Jaya Ramji of the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, told Church & State. "We found evidence of promotion of specific religious messages by the GPA and its grantees in official GPA documents, in monthly reports submitted by grantees, and even in grantees' funding proposals and proposed curriculums."

Supporters of church-state separation and those who worry about replacing effective programs with an untested "faithbased" approach fear that history may be about to repeat itself as the federal government increases tax funding for marriageimprovement programs.

"We have already seen the triumph of ideology over research in the refusal to admit that teen sex-education programs which combine abstinence or resistance messages with contraceptive information are more effective than abstinence-only programs," said Coontz. "And knowing something about the prevalence of problems such as addiction, infidelity, and domestic violence among impoverished populations, I worry a lot about marriage preparation and counseling programs being conducted by people who have an across-the board moral condemnation of divorce, or who see unwed motherhood as so immoral that they would advise a woman to marry the father of her child under almost any circumstance."

Continued Coontz, "We tried a faith-based substitute for government programs before, in the late 19th century, and it led to some terrible abuses in the treatment of immigrants, AfricanAmericans and working women who violated the reformers' views about the proper role of women."

Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn agreed that the new approach is troublesome.

"The Bush administration seems convinced that every social problem can be fixed by knocking holes in the wall of separation between church and state and throwing large amounts of taxpayer money at houses of worship," Lynn said. "Houses of worship undoubtedly have something to say about marriage, but that's no reason to encourage them to run religious programs on the taxpayer's dime. The American people should not say 'I do' to this scheme."