Coming Soon To A Town Near You: Government-Funded Churches?

Yesterday’s "Wall of Separation” noted that the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case dealing with the right of taxpayers to challenge the “faith-based” initiative in court.

The stories in today’s newspapers reporting on the arguments are startling for one thing: They underscore how extreme the Bush administration’s view on church-state relations is. Unfortunately, a high court majority may be poised to accept it.

The New York Times and other media outlets noted a telling exchange between Solicitor General Paul D. Clement and Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Breyer asked Clement if a taxpayer should have the right to challenge a law that commemorated the Pilgrims “by building a government church at Plymouth Rock where we will have the regular worship in the Puritan religion?”

“I would say no,” Clement replied.

Breyer pressed further, asking about a law that required the government to build churches “all over America” that represented a single denomination. “Nobody could challenge it?” he asked.

Again Clement’s reply was shocking: “There would not be taxpayer standing.”

So, in a nutshell, here is the Bush administration’s position: The federal government can actually start building churches, and you as a taxpayer should have no right to go to court to stop it. This view was also adopted by several Religious Right groups in legal briefs.

Chief Justice John Roberts tried to help Clement out by asserting that people opposed to government-build churches would still have the legal right to sue simply by asserting that they were victims of religious discrimination. That’s cold comfort coming from this court. During yesterday’s argument, Justice Antonin Scalia pooh-poohed the idea that people should be able to sue over government promotion of religion simply because it offends them.

Justice Samuel Alito also lobbed softballs at Clement, leading Clement at one point to actually thank Alito for a friendly question.

Americans United warned the nation that Roberts and Alito were likely to harbor extreme views on church-state relations. Their line of questioning yesterday indicates that they have similarly crabbed views about the right of taxpayers to challenge the diverting of public funds for religious purposes.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison crafted the church-state wall largely because they were opposed to the idea of forcing people to support religion against their will through taxation. To assert that taxpayers should have no right to challenge government-funded churches rips out the very heart of the First Amendment.

Jefferson and Madison must be spinning in their graves.

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By Rob Boston, assistant communications director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.