Court Bars State Effort Using Faith in Prisons
By NEELA BANERJEE
New York Times
A federal appeals panel ruled yesterday that a state-financed evangelical Christian program to help prisoners re-enter civilian life fostered religious indoctrination and violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, was the latest in a series of rulings over the last year to reinforce laws that bar government money from promoting religion, said Robert Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University who is an expert on religion-based initiatives.
“The main thing it does is reaffirm the obligation of government not to fund programs that intermingle secular and religious content,” Professor Tuttle said of the new ruling. “The federal government has come to terms with that over the last year. Even when it has won cases, there hasn’t been a single decision that would allow the government to intertwine secular and religious content.”
The current case was filed more than four years ago by Americans United for Separation of Church and State against the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, an organization affiliated with the Prison Fellowship Ministries and the Iowa Corrections Department. Prison Fellowship Ministries was founded by Charles W. Colson, an ally of President Bush and an influential evangelical who went to prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up in the Nixon administration.
“The decision casts a long, deep shadow over faith-based programs in states, and even at the federal level,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of the church-state organization.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
A federal appeals panel ruled yesterday that a state-financed evangelical Christian program to help prisoners re-enter civilian life fostered religious indoctrination and violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, was the latest in a series of rulings over the last year to reinforce laws that bar government money from promoting religion, said Robert Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University who is an expert on religion-based initiatives.
“The main thing it does is reaffirm the obligation of government not to fund programs that intermingle secular and religious content,” Professor Tuttle said of the new ruling. “The federal government has come to terms with that over the last year. Even when it has won cases, there hasn’t been a single decision that would allow the government to intertwine secular and religious content.”
The current case was filed more than four years ago by Americans United for Separation of Church and State against the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, an organization affiliated with the Prison Fellowship Ministries and the Iowa Corrections Department. Prison Fellowship Ministries was founded by Charles W. Colson, an ally of President Bush and an influential evangelical who went to prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up in the Nixon administration.
“The decision casts a long, deep shadow over faith-based programs in states, and even at the federal level,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of the church-state organization.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
See also the reporting by David Pitt .
A couple of obersevations :
1. Retired Supreme Court Justice O’Connor participated in the Appeals Court panel … will the US Supreme Court overrule a retired Justice’s ruling ?
2. The Prison Fellowship program is active at Lino Lakes. Does (or did) Minnesota provide any state funding for this program? If it did, when did it stop? Did it stop as a result of the original ruling (June 2006)? Who pushed for this funding?
3. Should the Iowa AG have advised the legislature to stop funding the program … as opposed to informing them to keep funding it while it was under appeal. That’s akin to have a judge rule an act was criminal, and the AG allowing the act to be repeated while the criminal appealed the ruling.
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