Don't care how you are slanted "politically" - this should be of great concern to all Americans:
Bush Plans to Let Religious Groups Get Building Aid
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
ASHINGTON, Jan. 22 The Bush administration plans to allow religious groups for the first time to use federal housing money to help build centers where religious worship is held, as long as part of the building is also used for social services.
The policy shift, which was made in a rule that the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed this month, significantly expands the administration's contentious religion-based initiative.
| Advertisement |  |
The White House says it wants to end discrimination against religious groups. Opponents say the policy breaches the separation of church and state.
Current regulations generally prohibit religious groups from using federal housing and community development grants, which totaled $7.7 billion last year, to build or rehabilitate structures. The new rules, still subject to final approval by housing officials, allow the use of federal aid to acquire, rehabilitate or build centers used for religious and specifically approved nonreligious activities, so long as no federal money is used for the religious section.
A church could erect a building using federal money to create a shelter for the homeless in one part and private money to create a sanctuary in another part, officials said. A synagogue could use a grant to rehabilitate part of its building for a counseling center for AIDS patients or the poor. A Muslim group could apply for federal money to upgrade the lighting and equipment in a room in its mosque to allow it to be used as an counseling center for single parents.
Bush administration officials, who have made religion-based initiatives a cornerstone of their agenda, said that religious organizations had historically been discriminated against in the fierce competition for federal grants and that the change was simply intended to level the field to compete for the pool of money.
"We see no reason to exclude religious organizations from participation in these programs if there can be a reasonable mechanism to ensure that a program has no particular religious connotation one way or another," the general counsel of the housing department, Richard A. Hauser, said in an interview. "There's no reason you can't have a cathedral upstairs and something that would look like any other room in the basement" for counseling.
Civil rights advocates, legal experts and Congressional critics attacked the change. They said it moved the government dangerously close to financing the building of houses of worship in violation of the separation of church and state.
"This is probably the most clearly unconstitutional aspect of the White House's faith-based initiative that we've seen up to this point," said Christopher Anders, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What this does is take federal money that is serving the neediest of the needy in our society and diverts it to the bricks-and-mortar construction of churches and sanctuaries and other places of worship."
Opponents said the change forced the government into the difficult position of having to determine which part of a building is used for worship and which is for social services.
"You run into the nightmarish problem of having the government monitor what goes on inside churches" and sanctuaries, said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who promised to seek hearings on the change. "Are we going to start sending in the inspector general to charge people with committing a bar mitzvah?"
A spokeswoman for the housing department, Diane Tomb, said the proposed change grew out of misinterpretations of past policy that effectively blocked religious groups from access to housing programs.
In a New York City case, Ms. Tomb said, a religious group was wrongfully blocked from activities in a common area of a publicly financed housing project. "That's discrimination," she said.
President Bush made headlines in a speech on Dec. 12 when he bypassed Congress and issued an executive order to make it easier for religious groups to receive federal money for welfare programs.