AJC To Al Gore On Charitable Choice: We Fear Your Words Will Come Back To Haunt All Of Us

American Jewish Committee
Friday, 28 May 1999

The American Jewish Committee has expressed concern to Vice President Albert Gore about statements he made recently supporting "charitable choice" as the basis of a "new partnership" between faith-based organizations and government. Urging the Vice President to greatly clarify and expand upon his ideas for strict safeguards in this broad relationship, the AJC cautioned: "Failing that, we fear your words will come back to haunt all of us as weapons in the hands of those who would undermine the separation of church and state."

In a letter sent to the Vice President today by AJC President Bruce M. Ramer, the human rights agency said that the notion of a partnership between government and faith-based groups is not new, and that the history of this partnership is a venerable one. Far from objecting to it, the AJC has termed the involvement of religiously affiliated organizations in publicly-funded social service provisions "desirable to the extent that it is consistent with the Establishment Clause."

Mr. Ramer said what is new in the 'charitable choice' program, which originated in the 1996 welfare reform law, "is a structure that seeks to ignore binding constitutional law, not to mention sound public policy, by permitting pervasively religious institutions, such as churches and other houses of worship, to receive taxpayer dollars for programs that have not been made discrete and institutionally separate. In so doing, and in failing to include other appropriate church-state safeguards, 'charitable choice' opens the door to publicly funded programs in which recipients of social services may be proselytized. 'Charitable choice' also creates a real possibility of creating rifts among the various faith groups as they compete for public funding and allows religious providers to engage in religious discrimination against employees who are paid with taxpayer dollars."

The AJC letter also noted that "with government dollars comes government oversight" and that "this kind of intrusion into the affairs of religious organizations, at least in the case of pervasively sectarian organizations, is exactly the type of entanglement of religion and state against which the Constitution guards. Such intrusion can have no effect but to undermine the distinctiveness, indeed the very mission, of religious institutions."

For more information, or to contact American Jewish Committee, see their website at: www.ajc.org