Posted on 11/27/2004 2:50:54 PM PST by wagglebee
The Wisconsin-based atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation is suing to cut off federal funding to a Christian child-mentoring program that helps troubled kids.
Last year, the federal government awarded a $225,000 contract, part of $9 million awarded to 52 Arizona groups, to Phoenix-based MentorKids USA, according to the Madison, Wisc.-based Capital Times.
The lawsuit, presided over by U.S. Judge John Shabaz, is demanding a summary judgment that federal funding of the program cease until the government "has a demonstrated plan in place to comply with its constitutional obligations," reports the Wisconsin paper.
Citing the First Amendment, the atheist foundation said, "Mentoring to convert is not a suitable social service to be provided by the government," said the report.
MentorKids USA was launched in 1997 by Orville Krieger, in partnership with Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship, "to address the needs of at-risk youth in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area by matching caring Christian adults with youth ages 8-17 who showed warning signs of becoming criminal offenders," says the Christian organization's website.
Originally called Phoenix MatchPoint, the group changed its name last January to MentorKids USA. It has a long and successful track record in mentoring children in trouble with the law, who have dysfunctional family backgrounds, have been physically or sexually abused or who are involved with drug or alcohol abuse. To date, MentorKids USA has helped over 500 kids.
In the program, mentors commit time each week to be a friend and role model for an at-risk youth. The mentors "offer concrete expressions of unconditional love and support to the mentee," says the group's website, "and the two participate in activities designed to build friendship, trust, and constructive values."
Some of the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "legal accomplishments," according to its website, include:
Winning the first federal lawsuit challenging direct funding by the government of a faith-based agency
Overturning a state Good Friday holiday
Winning a lawsuit barring direct taxpayer subsidy of religious schools
Removing Ten Commandments monuments and crosses from public land
Halting the Post Office from issuing religious cancellations
Ending 51 years years of illegal bible instruction in public schools
According to its website, the non-profit foundation was incorporated in Wisconsin in 1978 and is "a national membership association of freethinkers: atheists, agnostics and skeptics of any pedigree."
Why is it concerned with what it calls "state/church entanglement?"
"First Amendment violations are accelerating," says the group's website. "The religious right is campaigning to raid the public till and advance religion at taxpayer expense, attacking our secular public schools, the rights of nonbelievers, and the Establishment Clause.
"The Foundation recognizes that the United States was first among nations to adopt a secular Constitution. The founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution wanted citizens to be free to support the church of their choice, or no religion at all. Our Constitution was very purposefully written to be a godless document, whose only references to religion are exclusionary.
"It is vital to buttress the Jeffersonian 'wall of separation between church and state' which has served our nation so well."
But William Rehnquist, current chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, says this view put forth by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the ACLU and similar groups is a fiction and mockery of the true meaning of the First Amendment.
The Establishment Clause, explained Rehnquist in a 1985 opinion, "forbade establishment of a national religion, and forbade preference among religious sects or denominations.
The Establishment Clause did not require government neutrality between religion and irreligion nor did it prohibit the Federal Government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to religion. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the 'wall of separation' [between church and state]."
The burr for me is that the Faith Based Ministries program supports mosques.
By the way, a line should be drawn between the second amendment and the states as well because the second amendment is actually uniques in its wording and is not just a restraint on the feds. JMHO, of course.
LOL.
1. If they weren't referring to God, they would have used a word like "benefits."
2. Given the preamble of the Declaration alone, one can't credibly argue that the Founding Fathers intended the Constitution to be God-free, because they had no wish for the government being detailed to be God-free. Once you start looking at their other writings (Washington's Farewell Address, etc.) the idea of the God-free American Republic becomes downright ludicrous. Those who make such arguments seem to be confusing a government that recognizes and respects God with a theocracy, and there is a wide, wide gulf between those two concepts.
"Praise God from Whom all blessings flow..."
Is that what the founding fathers intended? I strongly doubt it. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were thought to be universal. The original 13 states each adopted a very similar set of rights, as well. Consider the Virginia Constitution:
Sec. 13 - Militia; standing armies; military subordinate to civil powerCalifornia doesn't have such a cluase. Who will protect my second amendment rights here? Right now, I can't count on the federal government, the state government, the courts, or the press.
That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
The founding fathers might be regretting their wording of the second amendment if they were alive to see what has happened, but I doubt that anything they could have written back then would have helped us.
BTW, is your screen name in any way connected to the Castle AFB KC-135 stratotanker of the same name?
Arguing lack of religious content and intention in American founding documents and their authors is only slightly easier than arguing lack of religious content and intention on the Focus on the Family website. You are to be commended for taking on such an immense challenge.
See my post 105.
I am not a Ray Moore fan by any means, but if you use the word "infamous" to describe him, shouldn't the SCOTUS get the same derision? They have Moses with the tablets carved on the wall over their heads...
F these atheists.
Office of the Attorney General
Washington D.C. 20530
May 17, 2001
Mr. James J. Baker
Executive Director
National Rifle Association
Institute for Legislative Action
11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax, VA 20030
Dear Mr. Baker,
Thank you for your letter of April 10, 2001 regarding my views on the Second Amendment. While I cannot comment on any pending litigation, let me state unequivocally my view that the text and the original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the of right of individuals to keep and bear firearms.
While some have argued that the Second Amendment guarantees only a "collective" right of the States to maintain militias, I believe the Amendment's plain meaning and original intent prove otherwise. Like the First and Fourth Amendments, the Second Amendment protects the rights of "the people," which the Supreme Court has noted is a term of art that should be interpreted consistently throughout the Bill of Rights United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990) (plurality opinion). Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers. See, e.g. Federalist No. 46 (Madison); Federalist No. 29 (Hamilton); see also, Thomas Jefferson, Proposed Virginia Constitution, 1764 ("No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."); George Mason at Virginia's U.S. Constitution ratification convention 1788 ("I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people . . . To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.").
This is not a novel position. In early decisions, the United States Supreme Court routinely indicated that the right protected by the Second Amendment applied to individuals. See, e.g., Logan v. United States, 144 U.S. 263, 276 (1892); Miller v. Texas, 153 U.S. 535, 538 (1893); Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 281-82 (1897): Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581, 597 (1900). Justice Story embraced the same view in his influential Commentaries on the Constitution. See 3 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution § 1890 p. 746 (1833). It is the view that was adopted by United States Attorney General Homer Cummings before Congress in testifying about the constitutionality of the first federal gun control statute, the National Firearms Act of 1934. See The National Firearms Act of 1934: Hearings on H.R. 9066 Before the House Comm. On Ways and Means, 73rd Cong. 6, 13, 19 (1934). As recently as 1986, the United States Congress and President Ronald Reagan
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Would you be in favor of federal funding for a Mosque-associated mentoring program?
The postmark that goes over a stamp and cancels it is also known as a cancellation mark. Perhaps the government was going to put "In God We Trust" or "Merry Christmas" or something on a cancellation?
Let's note for the record that Christmas stamps with the Virgin Mary and Jesus come out every year and the atheists haven't been able to do squat about it. Christmas was established as a federal holiday during the Grant administration to honor Jesus as a philosopher. It must really cheese the FFRF off...
No one wants seperation of Church and State banned, rescinded, folded, spindeld or mutilated. We just would like to see the doctrine restored to Jefferson's original intent, rather than the Madalyn Murray O'Hair intent we are currently using.
Dan Barker is the head of Freedom from Religion. A former minister who switched denominations numerous times (Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Nazarene, Quaker at one time or another) and then has been on a personal anti-Christian kick for 20 years.
Please cite the article and section. I'm sure we'll find it fascinating.
The Founders thought it did, which is why the establishment clause in the First Amendment exists in the first place.
State religions, after all, are the biggest reason the first colonists came over here in the first place.
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