Faith-Based Welfare Reform:
A Constitutional Crises
Part One
Welfare Reform
The door to President Bush’s faith-based
social welfare agenda was opened by the previous “charitable choice”
clause. This clause came attached to
key welfare legislation enacted during the Clinton administration. During that era, Clinton declared that
government welfare, as defined at the time, was to end. The subsequent legislation was the product
of a bipartisan reform movement that crystallized in the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. It replaced the long standing Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families (TANF) program. The
TANF legislation marked a revolution in public welfare because it put a
five-year limit on welfare assistance and imposed strict work requirements on
the recipients. The explicit
economic goal was to reduce the number of people on welfare and thereby cut the
costs of supporting a government funded welfare system. This was to be accomplished not only by
limiting how long anyone could stay on welfare, but also by emphasizing job
search and remedial education. These
latter elements were dedicated to getting the recipients successfully installed
in the wage-earning mainstream.
Along the
way, however, PRWORA got tangled up with a political agenda aimed at
disenfranchising the government welfare bureaucracy altogether. The root agenda was to contract actual
administration of the services out to private sector organizations. Thus, the implicit goal was to move toward
reducing civil service workforce involvement to a mere oversight function. This is what sparked the PRWORA and charitable-choice
entanglement. The defining political
crucible was the ensuing argument that if secular (non-religious) human service
organizations could bid for administrative rights, then existing “faith-based”
charity organizations should also be able to bid. At that point, the question really should have been, “why involve
any private-sector organization, secular or otherwise, in the administration of
government funded welfare?” The
political incentives versus the economic and cultural inequities amount to an
issue more complex then might immediately be apparent. For this reason, the crucial factors
underlying the politics of private sector involvement will receive close
attention as this commentary progresses.
The intention is to demonstrate just how bad a legislative piece of work
the charitable-choice clause really is.
Further, it will show how dangerous it is to both the solvency of our
Constitution and to our civil rights as citizens and taxpayers.
One of the
selling points for allowing religious charities to participate in PRWORA and
TANF was the claim that it gave the welfare recipients a “charitable choice”
about who would administer their entitlements.
Still, it was never clear just how to accomplish this on a location-by-location
basis. First, creating an equal availability of secular and faith-based
providers in every affected community is a virtually impossible task. Even if alternative provider organizations
were available, the practical reality of any kind of choice would be diminished
due to the simple problem of neighborhood proximity to one or the other. Even with this problem set aside, a real
choice presupposes that all recipients are informed about their options. They could just as well end up directed to
the nearest provider, or to the one with the lowest caseload, or for some other
reason amounting to a biased referral.
Even with this, there is the more pressing matter of the specific
religious affiliation of the faith-based providers. With the great diversity of religious persuasions in America, it
is unrealistic to expect that a truly impartial system of “chartable choice”
could ever materialize. This
observation brings the discussion around to one of the hardest points of all.
The “charitable choice” clause was rhetorically
justified by the further stipulation that participating faith-based charities
would not discriminate in their employee hiring practices. Nor would they use their status as
government-endorsed and funded providers to proselytize or otherwise exploit
the situation in the service of their religion. In fact, however, the “charitable choice” clause did relax some
of the existing restrictions against proselytization and discriminatory
hiring. This was to allow the charities
to “retain their religious character”.
As such, charitable choice was a corrupt idea from its inception. Where exactly was the legal line to be drawn
about discriminatory hiring and proselytization, and how was it to be enforced? To make the situation even graver, Bush’s
executive orders and legislative initiatives aim to further shield the
faith-based organizations from anti-discrimination laws! His agenda should be very troubling because
if faith-based providers can discriminate in their internal hiring practices,
then little doubt can exist that welfare recipients will suffer discrimination
as well.
Bush clearly intends to eliminate as many
existing “barriers” to faith-based eligibility as he possibly can. Included among the target barriers is any
institutional mindset inside government that would bias the selection processes
in favor of secular organizations (source). This is tantamount to directing the
government to brush aside the Constitution to actually favor faith-based
welfare providers (note). Unquestionably, the Christian charities
would be the predominant beneficiaries of the legislation. Although theoretically, it would seem that
the same competitive rights must be open to all organizations irrespective of
religion, denomination, or sect. The
implied equality of opportunity itself is a serious sticking point both inside
and outside the right-wing Christian camps.
Notably, the only religious charities thus
far mentioned by the administration as potentially eligible are the Christian,
Jewish, and to a more token extent the Islamic organizations. Thus the initiative was corrupt from the
beginning because of a built-in favoritism toward “peoples of the book” as it
were. This should immediately raise
concerns about the eligibility of other competitors from among the Hindu,
Buddhist, Asian American, Native American, and Neo-pantheistic religious
persuasions for instance. At least in
theory, it would seem that organizations like the Ku Klux Clan, Black Muslims,
and Church of Scientology are eligible to compete (source). This puts the government in the extremely
awkward and constitutionally invalid role of deciding what “faith-based”
organizations are worthy of endorsement.
The likely political reality is that few if any organizations outside of
the Judeo-Christian linage would ever receive more then token consideration. Consequently, a deluge of lawsuits claiming
biased government selection policies are justifiably certain to follow. For these reasons alone, both the previous
“charitable choice” clause and the present “faith-based” legislation is
constitutionally invalid and politically irresponsible. These are only the most visible factors that
make Bush’s welfare reform game unacceptable.