The reality is that there is no evidence linking violent games to mass shootings. We tend to return to this particular element, and it's interesting to see how quickly people like to latch on to this noncorrelation as if it were truly meaningful. The notion that mass homicides are linked to violent media was debunked as far back as 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service, which found that school shooters didn't consume high levels of violent media. But as a society we tend to focus on video games because it's easy to do so.
Curiously, no one seems interested in investigating the effects of media popular among the elderly. Our attention to video games in the cases of some shootings but not others is what psychologists call confirmation bias, and it creates the illusion of a correlation where there is none. It's worth asking ourselves why we keep returning to video games despite the lack of evidence to support its link to violence.
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| Well, at least it was in a biology museum, not a church. |
Gee, do you think conservatives will bitch about "judicial activism" and "legislating from the bench" after this decision, which will overturn McCain-Feingold and 100 years of legal precedent and statutory law?
Methinks not.
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122805666
This op-ed clearly belies the myth of the Lib'rul Media. In America we have a Corporate Media. The Corporate Media wants to turn a profit for their shareholders. So, they cut costs by keeping a small staff of journalists, who are not expected to try very hard, plagiarize from each other shamelessly, and are not given the time or money to investigate important stories.
To minimize risk of alienating advertisers and losing profits, the Corporate Media is basically conservative, adhering closely to whatever the status quo happens to be at the moment. The only problem is, a risk-averse, uncurious media is no good to us citizens of a democracy, who depend on accurate, timely information to make correct political decisions.
U.S. media have lost the will to dig deep
A changed news culture has let several important investigative stories slip through the cracks.
By Greg Palast
April 27, 2007 | LA Times
IN AN E-MAIL uncovered and released by the House Judiciary Committee last month, Tim Griffin, once Karl Rove's right-hand man, gloated that "no [U.S.] national press picked up" a BBC Television story reporting that the Rove team had developed an elaborate scheme to challenge the votes of thousands of African Americans in the 2004 election.
Griffin wasn't exactly right. The Los Angeles Times did run a follow-up article a few days later in which it reported the findings. But he was essentially right. Most of the major U.S. newspapers and the vast majority of television news programs ignored the story even though it came at a critical moment just weeks before the election.
According to Griffin (who has since been dispatched to Arkansas to replace one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department), the mainstream media rejected the story because it was wrong.
"That guy is a British reporter who accepted some false allegations and made a story up," he said.
Let's get one fact straight, Mr. Griffin. "That guy" is not a British reporter. I am an American living abroad, putting investigative reports on the air from London for the British Broadcasting Corp.
I'm not going to argue with Rove's minions about the validity of our reporting, which led the news in Britain. But I can tell you this: To the extent that it was ignored in the United States, it wasn't because the report was false. It was because it was complicated and murky and because it required a lot of time and reporting to get to the bottom of it. In fact, not one U.S. newsperson even bothered to ask me or the BBC for the data and research we had painstakingly done in our effort to demonstrate the existence of the scheme.
The truth is, I knew that a story like this one would never be reported in my own country. Because investigative reporting — the kind Jack Anderson used to do regularly and which was carried in hundreds of papers across the country, the kind of muckraking, data-intensive work that takes time and money and ruffles feathers — is dying.
I've been through this before, too many times. Take this investigative report, also buried in the U.S.: Back in December 2000, I received two computer disks from the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Analysis of the data, plus documents that fell my way, indicated that Harris' office had purged thousands of African Americans from Florida's voter rolls as "felons." Florida now admits that many of these voters were not in fact felons. Nevertheless, the blacklisting helped cost Al Gore the White House.
I reported on the phony felon purge in Britain's Guardian and Observer and on the BBC while Gore was still in the race, while the count was still on.
Yet the story of the Florida purge never appeared in the U.S. daily papers or on television. Until months later, that is, after the Supreme Court had decided the election, when it was picked up by the Washington Post and others.
U.S. papers delayed the story until the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a report saying our Guardian/BBC story was correct: Innocents lost their vote. At that point, protected by the official imprimatur, American editors felt it safe enough to venture out with the story. But by then, George W. Bush could read it from his chair in the Oval Office.
Again and again, I see this pattern repeated. Until there is some official investigation or allegation made by a politician, there is no story.
Or sometimes the media like to cover the controversy, not the substance, preferring an ambiguous and unsatisfying "he said, she said" report. Safe reporting, but not investigative.
I know some of the reasons why investigative reporting is on the decline. To begin with, investigations take time and money. A producer from "60 Minutes," watching my team's work on another voter purge list, said: "My God! You'd have to make hundreds of calls to make this case." In America's cash-short, instant-deadline world, there's not much room for that.
Are there still aggressive, talented investigative reporters in the U.S.? There are hundreds. I'll mention two: Seymour Hersh, formerly of the New York Times, and Robert Parry, formerly of the Associated Press, who uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal. The operative word here is "formerly." Parry tells me that he can no longer do this kind of investigative work within the confines of a U.S. daily newsroom.
One of the biggest disincentives to doing investigative journalism is that it jeopardizes future access to politicians and corporate elite. During the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial, the testimony of Judith Miller and other U.S. journalists about the confidences they were willing to keep in order to maintain access seemed to me sadly illuminating.
Expose the critters and the door is slammed. That's not a price many American journalists are willing to pay.
It's different in Britain. After the 2000 election, when Harris' lawyer refused to respond to our evidence, my BBC producer made sure I chased him down the hall waving the damning documents. That's one sure way to end "access."
Reporters in Britain must adhere to extraordinarily strict standards of accuracy because there is no Bill of Rights, no "freedom of the press" to provide cover against lawsuits. Further, the British government fines reporters who make false accusations and jails others who reveal "official secrets."
I've long argued that Britain needs a 1st Amendment right to press freedom. It could, of course, borrow ours. We don't use it.
GREG PALAST is the author of "Armed Madhouse: From New Orleans to Baghdad -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild."
March 31, 2007
Guest Columnist, The New York Times
Religion Without Truth
By STANLEY FISH
In 1992, at a conference of Republican governors, Kirk Fordice of Mississippi referred to America as a "Christian nation." One of his colleagues rose to say that what Governor Fordice no doubt meant is that America is a Judeo-Christian nation. If I meant that, Fordice replied, I would have said it.
I thought of Fordice when I was reading Time magazine's April 2 cover story, "The Case for Teaching the Bible," by David Van Biema, which also rehearses the case for not teaching the Bible. The arguments are predictable.
On the one side, knowledge of the Bible "is essential to being a full-fledged, well-rounded citizen"; also, if you get into a debate with a creationist, it would be good if you knew what you're talking about.
On the other side: bring the Bible into the schools and you are half a step away from proselytizing; and besides, courses in the Bible typically play down the book's horrific parts (dashing children against stones and the like), and say little about the killings done in its name.
As the Time article reports, the usual response to those who fear that allowing the camel's nose under the tent will sooner or later turn the tent into a revival meeting is to promise that the Bible will be taught as a secular text. Students will become familiar with the Bible's stories and learn how to spot references to them in works of literature stretching from Dante to Toni Morrison.
There may be a bit of instruction in doctrine here and there, but only as much as is necessary to understand an allusion, and never to a degree that would make anyone in the class uncomfortable.
Stephen Prothero of Boston University, who is cited several times by Van Biema, describes the project and the claim attached to it succinctly: "The academic study of religion provides a kind of middle space. ... It takes the biblical truth claims seriously and yet brackets them for purposes of classroom discussion." But that's like studying the justice system and bracketing the question of justice. (How do you take something seriously by putting it on the shelf?)
The truth claims of a religion — at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam — are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.
The metaphor that theologians use to make the point is the shell and the kernel: ceremonies, parables, traditions, holidays, pilgrimages — these are merely the outward signs of something that is believed to be informing them and giving them significance. That something is the religion's truth claims. Take them away and all you have is an empty shell, an ancient video game starring a robed superhero who parts the waters of the Red Sea, followed by another who brings people back from the dead. I can see the promo now: more exciting than "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "The Matrix." That will teach, but you won't be teaching religion.
The difference between the truth claims of religion and the truth claims of other academic topics lies in the penalty for getting it wrong. A student or a teacher who comes up with the wrong answer to a crucial question in sociology or chemistry might get a bad grade or, at the worst, fail to be promoted. Those are real risks, but they are nothing to the risk of being mistaken about the identity of the one true God and the appropriate ways to worship him (or her). Get that wrong, and you don't lose your grade or your job, you lose your salvation and get condemned to an eternity in hell.
Of course, the "one true God" stuff is what the secular project runs away from, or "brackets." It counsels respect for all religions and calls upon us to celebrate their diversity. But religion's truth claims don't want your respect. They want your belief and, finally, your soul. They are jealous claims. Thou shalt have no other God before me.
This is what Fordice meant. He understood that if he prefaced Christian with "Judeo," he would be blunting the force of the belief he adhered to and joining the ranks of the multiculturalist appreciators of everything. Once it's Judeo-Christian, it will soon be Judeo-Islamic-Christian and then Judeo-Islamic-Native American-Christian, and then. ... Teaching the Bible in that spirit may succeed in avoiding the dangers of proselytizing and indoctrination. But if you're going to cut the heart out of something, why teach it at all?
Stanley Fish, the Davidson-Kahn professor of law at Florida International University, is a guest columnist this month.
"Like the statement that protest is unpatriotic, the statement that protesters are likely to be terrorists, or likely to be otherwise violent, is damaging to our status as a free society. This assumption also collapses upon examination: Why would someone trying to change the system through protest be more likely than others to resort to violence to destroy the system?"
Report: New York Cops Tracked Activists Ahead of 2004 Republican Convention
Saturday , March 24, 2007
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Undercover New York police officers traveled around the United States and to Europe to observe activists who planned to protest at the 2004 Republican National Convention — including hundreds who showed no sign of illegal intent, a newspaper reported.
Posing as activists or sympathizers, the officers attended meetings of political groups in at least 15 U.S. states and filed reports with the police department's intelligence division, The New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday.
The officers involved in the "RNC Intelligence Squad" then identified certain groups as potential threats, the Times reported, citing hundreds of still-secret reports it viewed from the police department's intelligence division. The police often shared information with departments in other cities.
Police spokesman Paul Browne said the activities were legal. He said the operation was an essential part of preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during the convention.
"Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way," Browne told the Times.
The secret digests said some of the groups planned acts such as blocking intersections and hacking into Web sites. But the Times reported that the vast majority of the reports it viewed described people who gave no obvious sign of wrongdoing, such as members of the satirical performance-art group "Billionaires for Bush" and a group that had planned concerts with political speeches.
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the revelations of "spying" were shocking.
"The New York Civil Liberties Union condemns this operation and is considering legal action against the police department," she said in a statement.
More than 1,800 people were arrested at the four-day convention at Madison Square Garden, where President George W. Bush accepted his party's nomination for a second term in office. The convention was policed by as many as 10,000 officers.
Pending civil rights lawsuits have challenged the legitimacy of the arrests. Documents released under a court order in January showed that arrested protesters were held before their initial court appearances for up to six times longer than those arrested on charges unrelated to the convention.
The documents also show that the 2001 terrorist attacks heavily influenced the city's decision to detain and fingerprint hundreds of protesters at the convention.
In 2003, a federal judge — at the behest of Mayor Michael Bloomberg — broadened the NYPD's authority to investigate political, social and religious groups. Browne insisted police have not abused the new guidelines.
Browne told the Times that the 18 months of preparation before the convention allowed hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate while also ensuring that the convention had relatively few disruptions.
"It was a great success, and despite provocations, such as demonstrators throwing faux feces in the faces of police officers, the NYPD showed professionalism and restraint," he told the Times.
Life was different in Unit E at the state prison outside Newton, Iowa.
The toilets and sinks — white porcelain ones, like at home — were in a separate bathroom with partitions for privacy. In many Iowa prisons, metal toilet-and-sink combinations squat beside the bunks, to be used without privacy, a few feet from cellmates.
The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.
But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program — which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time — says on its Web site that it seeks "to 'cure' prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems" and showing inmates "how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past."
One Roman Catholic inmate, Michael A. Bauer, left the program after a year, mostly because he felt the program staff and volunteers were hostile toward his faith.
"My No. 1 reason for leaving the program was that I personally felt spiritually crushed," he testified at a court hearing last year. "I just didn't feel good about where I was and what was going on."
For Robert W. Pratt, chief judge of the federal courts in the Southern District of Iowa, this all added up to an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money for religious indoctrination, as he ruled in June in a lawsuit challenging the arrangement.
The Iowa prison program is not unique. Since 2000, courts have cited more than a dozen programs for having unconstitutionally used taxpayer money to pay for religious activities or evangelism aimed at prisoners, recovering addicts, job seekers, teenagers and children.
Nevertheless, the programs are proliferating. For example, the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest prison management company, with 65 facilities and 71,000 inmates under its control, is substantially expanding its religion-based curriculum and now has 22 institutions offering residential programs similar to the one in Iowa. And the federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs at least five multifaith programs at its facilities, is preparing to seek bids for a single-faith prison program as well.
Government agencies have been repeatedly cited by judges and government auditors for not doing enough to guard against taxpayer-financed evangelism. But some constitutional lawyers say new federal rules may bar the government from imposing any special requirements for how faith-based programs are audited.
And, typically, the only penalty imposed when constitutional violations are detected is the cancellation of future financing — with no requirement that money improperly used for religious purposes be repaid.
But in a move that some constitutional lawyers found surprising, Judge Pratt ordered the prison ministry in the Iowa case to repay more than $1.5 million in government money, saying the constitutional violations were serious and clearly foreseeable.
His decision has been appealed by the prison ministry to a federal appeals court and fiercely protested by the attorneys general of nine states and lawyers for a number of groups advocating greater government accommodation of religious groups. The ministry's allies in court include the Bush administration, which argued that the repayment order could derail its efforts to draw more religious groups into taxpayer-financed programs.
Officials of the Iowa program said that any anti-Catholic comments made to inmates did not reflect the program's philosophy, and are not condoned by its leadership.
Jay Hein, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said the Iowa decision was unfair to the ministry and reflects an "overreaching" at odds with legal developments that increasingly "show favor to religion in the public square."
And while he acknowledged the need for vigilance, he said he did not think the constitutional risks outweighed the benefits of inviting "faith-infused" ministries, like the one in Iowa, to provide government-financed services to "people of faith who seek to be served in this 'full-person' concept."
Crossing a Bright Line
Over the last two decades, legislatures, government agencies and the courts have provided religious organizations with a widening range of regulatory and tax exemptions. And in the last decade religious institutions have also been granted access to public money once denied on constitutional grounds, including historic preservation grants and emergency reconstruction funds.
In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that public money could be used for religious instruction or indoctrination, but only when the intended beneficiaries made the choice themselves between religious and secular programs — as when parents decide whether to use tuition vouchers at religious schools or secular ones. The court emphasized the difference between such "indirect" financing, in which the money flows through beneficiaries who choose that program, and "direct" funding, where the government chooses the programs that receive money.
But even in today's more accommodating environment, constitutional scholars agree that one line between church and state has remained fairly bright: The government cannot directly finance or support religious evangelism or indoctrination. That restriction typically has not loomed large when public money goes to religious charities providing essentially secular services, like job training, after-school tutoring, child care or food banks. In such cases, the beneficiaries need not accept the charity's religious beliefs to get the secular benefits the government is financing.
The courts have taken a different view, however, when public money goes directly to groups, like the Iowa ministry, whose method of helping others is to introduce them to a specific set of religious beliefs — and whose success depends on the beneficiary accepting those core beliefs. In those cases, most of the challenged grants have been struck down as unconstitutional.
Those who see faith-based groups as exceptionally effective allies in the battle against criminal recidivism, teen pregnancy, addiction and other social ills say these cases are rare, compared with the number of programs receiving funds, and should not tarnish the concept of bringing more religious groups into publicly financed programs, so long as any direct financing is used only for secular expenses.
That concept has been embodied most prominently since 2001 in the Bush administration's Faith-Based and Community Initiative, a high-profile effort to encourage religious and community groups to participate in government programs. More than 100 cities and 33 states have established similar initiatives, according to Mr. Hein.
The basic architecture of these initiatives has so far withstood constitutional challenge, although the Supreme Court agreed on Dec. 1 to consider a case on whether taxpayers have legal standing to bring such challenges against the Bush administration's program.
Defenders of these initiatives say they are necessary to eliminate longstanding government policies that discriminated against religious groups — to provide a level playing field, as one White House study put it.
But critics say the "level playing field" argument ignores the fact that giving public money directly to ministries that aim at religious conversion poses constitutional problems that simply do not arise when the money goes elsewhere.
Converting Young People
Those constitutional problems sharpen when young people are the intended beneficiaries of these transformational ministries. In recent years, several judges have concluded that children and teenagers, like prisoners, have too few options and too little power to make the voluntary choices the Supreme Court requires when public money flows to programs involving religious instruction or indoctrination.
That was the conclusion last year of a federal judge in Michigan, in a case filed by Teen Ranch, a nonprofit Christian facility that provides residential care for troubled or abused children ages 11 to 17.
In 2003, state officials imposed a moratorium on placements of children there, primarily because of its intensively religious programming. Lawyers for the ranch went to court to challenge that moratorium.
"Teen Ranch acknowledges that it is overtly and unapologetically a Christian facility with a Christian worldview that hopes to touch and improve the lives of the youth served by encouraging their conversion to faith in Christ, or assisting them in deepening their pre-existing Christian faith," observed a United States District judge, Robert Holmes Bell, in a decision released in September 2005.
Although youngsters in state custody could not choose where to be placed, they could refuse to go to the ranch if they objected to its religious character. As a result, the ranch's lawyers argued, the state money was constitutionally permissible.
The state contended that the children in its care were "too young, vulnerable and traumatized" to make genuine choices. The ranch disputed that and added that the children had case workers and other adults to guide them. Judge Bell rejected Teen Ranch's arguments. "Regardless of whether state wards are particularly vulnerable, they are children," he wrote.
The ranch in Michigan has discontinued operations pending the outcome of its appeal, said Mitchell E. Koster, who was its chief operating officer. "We are confident that our argument will win," Mr. Koster said. "It's just a question of at what level."
In another case early last year, a federal judge struck down a federal grant in 2003 to MentorKids USA, a ministry based in Phoenix, to provide mentors for the children of prisoners. In a case filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., the judge noted that the exclusively Christian mentors had to regularly assess whether the young people in their care seemed "to be progressing in relationship with God." In a program newsletter offered as evidence, its director said, "Our goal is to see every young adult choose Christ."
The federal government had been clearly informed in advance of the nature of the MentorKids ministry, said John Gibson [the guy from FOX? -- J], chairman of the group's board. "The court's decision meant that there were 50 kids we could have served that we were not able to serve."
In another case, more than $1 million in federal funds went to the Alaska Christian College in Soldotna, Alaska, which says it provides "a theologically based post-secondary education" to teenage Native Americans from isolated villages. But an investigator from the Education Department who visited the school last year found a first-year curriculum "that is almost entirely religious in nature."
The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued to block the financing. The school promised to use government money only for secular expenses , and federal financing resumed last May, according to Derek Gaubatz, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the college.
A number of government grants to finance sexual abstinence education have been successfully challenged. For example, the Louisiana Governor's Program on Abstinence gave federal money to several religious groups that used it for clearly unconstitutional purposes, a federal judge ruled in 2002, in a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
One grant went to a theater company that toured high schools performing a skit called "Just Say Whoa." The script contained many religious references including one in which a character called Bible Guy tells teenagers in the cast: "As Christians, our bodies belong to the Lord, not to us."
The federal judge said the grants were so poorly monitored that the state missed other clear signs of unconstitutional activity — as when one Catholic diocese sent monthly reports showing that it had used federal money "to support prayer at abortion clinics, pro-life marches and pro-life rallies." Gail Dignam, director of the abstinence program, said that state contracts now emphasize more clearly that no grant money may be used for religious activities.
The Programs in Prisons
Programs like the one at the Iowa prison are a rare ray of hope for American prisoners, and governments should encourage them, their supporters say.
"We have 2.3 million Americans in prison today; 700,000 of them will get out of prison this coming year," said Mark L. Earley, a former attorney general of Virginia. M any inmates come out of prison "much more antisocial than when they came in," he added. He said he saw faith-based groups as essential partners in any effective rehabilitation efforts.
Mr. Earley is the president and chief executive of Prison Fellowship Ministries, based in Lansdowne, Va. With almost $56 million a year in revenue, the ministry oversees the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, which operates the Iowa program.
Since its birth in 1976, Prison Fellowship has been most closely associated with one of its founders, Charles W. Colson, who said in a 2002 newsletter that the InnerChange program demonstrates "that Christ changes lives, and that changing prisoners from the inside out is the only crime-prevention program that really works."
In early 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State joined with a group of Iowa taxpayers and inmates to challenge the InnerChange program in federal court.
In ruling on that case, Judge Pratt noted that the born-again Christian staff was the sole judge of an inmate's spiritual transformation. If an inmate did not join in the religious activities that were part of his "treatment," the staff could write up disciplinary reports, generating demerits the inmate's parole board might see. Or they could expel the inmate.
And while the program was supposedly open to all, in practice its content was "a substantial disincentive" for inmates of other faiths to join, the judge noted. Although the ministry itself does not condone hostility toward Catholics, Roman Catholic inmates heard their faith criticized by staff members and volunteers from local evangelical churches, the judge found. And Jews and Muslims in the program would have been required to participate in Christian worship services even if that deeply offended their own religious beliefs.
Mr. Earley said Judge Pratt's decision was sharply inconsistent with current law and his standard for separating secular from religious expenses was so extreme that it would disqualify almost any faith-based program. He acknowledged that inmates, whatever their own faith, are required to participate in all program activities, including worship, but he insisted that a religious conversion is not required for success. InnerChange uses biblical references only to illustrate a set of universal values, such as integrity and responsibility, and not to exclude those of other faiths, he said, adding that it was "unfortunate" if any inmates felt the program denigrated Catholicism or any other Christian faith. Corrections officials in Iowa declined to comment on the case.
Not all programs in prisons are so narrowly focused. Florida now has three prisons that offer inmates, who must ask to be housed there, more than two dozen offerings ranging from various Christian denominations to Orthodox Judaism to Scientology. But at Newton, Judge Pratt found, there were few options — and no equivalent programs — without religious indoctrination.
"The state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates," Judge Pratt wrote. "There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates."
InnerChange, which has been widely praised by corrections officials and politicians, operates similar programs at prisons in Texas, Minnesota, Kansas, Arkansas and, by next spring, Missouri. Officials in those states are monitoring the Iowa case, but several said they believed their programs were sufficiently different to survive a similar challenge.
A government-financed religious education program at a county jail in Fort Worth was struck down by the Texas Supreme Court more than five years ago, and more lawsuits are pending. C orrections Corporation was among those sued last year by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is challenging a Christian residential program at a women's prison in Grant, N.M. The foundation has also sued the federal Bureau of Prisons over its faith-based rehabilitation programs. And Americans United, the Iowa plaintiff, and the American Civil Liberties Union have sued a job-training program run by a religious group at the Bradford County Jail near Troy, Pa.
Prison Fellowship Ministries is one of about a half-dozen Christian groups that operate programs at jails and prisons run by the Corrections Corporation. The company's lawyers are studying the Iowa decision, said a spokeswoman, Louise Grant. "But we are not, at this time, changing or altering any of our programming based on that, or any other ruling."
Inadequate Monitoring
Government agencies have been criticized repeatedly for inadequately watching these programs. Besides the criticism in various court decisions, the Government Accountability Office has twice raised questions about cloudy guidelines and inadequate safeguards against government-financed evangelism.
In its most recent audit released in June, the G.A.O., which examined faith-based organizations in four states, found that some were violating federal rules against proselytizing and that government agencies did not have adequate safeguards against such violations.
The problem is not that none of these programs are audited. Every group that gets a federal grant worth more than $500,000 has to pay a private auditor to examine its books and report to the government. Many federal programs, like those that provide Medicaid services or help the government allocate arts grants, require additional audits.
But no supplemental audits are required under the faith-based initiative — indeed, it would probably violate the Bush administration's new regulations to do so, said Robert W. Tuttle, a professor of law and religion at George Washington University and co-director of legal research, along with Ira C. Lupu, for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, a project of the Rockefeller Institute.
"The rules can be read to prohibit special audit requirements because that would be considered a stigma, which would be discriminatory," Professor Tuttle said. "But that flies in the face of constitutional logic, because religion is special, and that special quality has to be reflected in program guidelines and audit rules."
The G.A.O. also says the government cannot easily or accurately track either how much money is flowing to groups or whether they are using the funds in unconstitutional ways.
The Bush administration is already studying whether these constitutional problems can be resolved by reshaping many government grants into voucher programs under which the beneficiary decides where the money goes. But vouchers are a limited solution because most social service agencies need to know that a certain amount of money is assured before they can begin operations. ['Vouchers' now have a kind of holy aura among conservatives. But no matter what they're used for, vouchers are still about redistributing our tax dollars. Is that really conservative? -- J]
Mr. Hein, the White House official, agreed that vouchers could clarify the legal landscape. But even where they are not practical, he said, the Bush administration remains committed to keeping the doors to government financing open for as many religious groups as possible.
