Last November we published an editorial opposing the use of state funds to operate programming at religious-based schools. It was then and is now, a simple matter of heeding the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. While some people try to promote the matter as being complex, open to interpretation or malleable, it isn’t. The Constitution is clear. So were the people who wrote it.
Back in November 2011, Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked the state to investigate whether Growing God’s Kingdom, a preschool in West Fork owned by state Rep. Justin Harris, R-West Fork, spends tax dollars it receives from the Arkansas Better Chance program to promote religion.
Last week we reported that the state Department of Human Services proposed a rule requiring preschools that receive money from the ABC program to conduct no religious activities unless they occur outside of a seven-hour school day. With grim predictability and obvious conflicts of interest, Harris railed against the measure. Considering that his school was given over half a million dollars in state funds, it’s easy to discern the true core of his umbrage.
Almost laughably, Harris tried to paint the DHS rule as a case of undue influence by carpet-baggers, “Let’s say we’re not going to have an outside group (Americans United) tell us what to do,” he told reporters at a recent press conference.
The only “outside” force compelling the DHS rule is the U. S. Constitution. As such, when legislators like Harris and Sen. Johnny Key, R-Mountain Home — who owns two Christian-themed schools that receive ABC money (just under $300,000 for the current school year) — balk, it becomes very difficult to accept their opposition as a matter of religious principle.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
According to an Arkansas News Bureau report, Sen. Percy Malone, D-Arkadelphia, co-chairman of the Administrative Rules and Regulations Subcommittee, said Friday he had not read the proposed rule, but stated, “I do support separation of church and state.”
Malone recognizes the kind of slippery slope these indulgences beget. He said if the state were to fund instruction in the Christian faith, it could not say no to funding the teaching of other beliefs.
“I don’t want to be part of creating a situation in Arkansas where … every cult or every religious belief is being taught to children in Arkansas using Arkansas taxpayers’ money,” he said.
Malone is correct that once begun, this path opens the state to funding all kinds of things that many taxpayers might rather not finance. More importantly, the founders, principally James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, knew the dangers inherent to state-sponsored religion, even one in which they both might believe.
Madison argued that to promote any religion was outside the proper scope of government. Even for the government to sponsor all Christian religions, as fellow patriot, Patrick Henry, had proposed, would establish a dangerous precedent, “Who does not see that the same authority, which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?”
If not for those reasons, we might turn to the countries in which we have recently fought protracted wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, both nations strongly dominated by Islamic law. As with Christian governmental leaders, it is not that Islamic leaders are intrinsically corrupt. Rather it’s that theocracies as a general construct, lend themselves to incontrovertible excesses. That which was good and just is invariably transformed into the rationalizing tool of despots who cloak their oppression and cruelty in “the will of God.” No one ever intends it to become thus, but it always seems to do so. The only way to stop a slide down that path is to prevent those seemingly benign first chips at the Constitution. The DHS rule doesn’t prevent Harris and his ilk from doing what they want; it just frees the rest of us from paying for it.