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]."
Notice how none of the signatory agnostics or Deists minded the reference to the standard Gregorian calendar.
Article 52 [Religion]
(1) Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess or not to profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or atheistic propaganda. Incitement of hostility or hatred on religious grounds is prohibited.
(2) In the USSR, the church is separated from the state, and the school from the church.
And Liberals wonder why we hate their ideals so much !
So Javelina, what is behind the mad rush to revise history and Christianize our Constitution? I think I know the answer, and I'm sympathetic to the proponents, if wary of them as well. I'd like to hear your views. You might enjoy http://ismellarat.com/ by the way. Patrick Henry refused to attend the Constitutional Convention because he knew Christianity would be excluded.
Here is how I see it:
Amendment 1
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Congress has NEVER tried to establish an official religion. However, what we see now are many attempts by the left to make Congress "prohibit the free exercise" of religion. And it is this second phrase which has been the most ignored. As I said, the phrase "separation of church and state" exists NOWHERE in our Constitution (though the Soviets did have it).
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Constitution is the framework for the FEDERAL government and Congress is a FEDERAL body. Congress is banned from establishing a state religion; however, any state clearly can unless the individual state's constitution prohibits it. Nearly all of the cases we see in court are against state or local governments, it should never even be a federal issue.
hey mark wheres that on the map
Article 2 [Foundational Principles]
The Islamic Republic is a system based on belief in:
1) the One God (as stated in the phrase "There is no god except Allah"), His exclusive sovereignty and right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His commands; 2) Divine revelation and its fundamental role in setting forth the laws;
3) the return to God in the Hereafter, and the constructive role of this belief in the course of man's ascent towards God;
4) the justice of God in creation and legislation;
5) continuous leadership and perpetual guidance, and its fundamental role in ensuring the uninterrupted process of the revolution of Islam; 6) the exalted dignity and value of man, and his freedom coupled with responsibility before God; in which equity, justice, political, economic, social, and cultural independence, and national solidarity are secured by recourse to: a) continuous leadership of the holy persons, possessing necessary qualifications, exercised on the basis of the Koran and the Sunnah, upon all of whom be peace;
b) sciences and arts and the most advanced results of human experience, together with the effort to advance them further;
c) negation of all forms of oppression, both the infliction of and the submission to it, and of dominance, both its imposition and its acceptance.
We could change some of the words around, and we'd have a Christian Constitution. That would really help, don't you think?
Exclusionary? Hmmm....Congress shall make no law respecting the establishing of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof is hardly exclusionary. Congress can make no law establishing or excluding a religion, and there can be no religious test for office. How that gets defined as a banishment of all things associated with God is beyond me. Precisely what do these people think prohibiting the free exercise means? Our courts routinely prohibit the free exercise and expression of religion.
See #46
Ping.
American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) - http://www.aclj.org
Thomas More Law Center - http://www.thomasmore.org
Alliance Defense Fund - http://www.alliancedefensefund.org
The Rutherford Institute - http://www.rutherford.org/
Exactly. Big Brother, Big Sisters must not exclude homosexuals. That's discrimination don't you know. We wouldn't want to deprive any sexual minority from their "right" to "mentor" our children. I mean, it's not like they are Christians or anything.
Atheists are so tolerant of the beliefs of others.
"You don't have to be a saint to be a mentor." Arghhhh.
What is a religious cancellation? anyone?
There is nothing in the site you liked to that supports that contention.
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