The Promise of Charitable Choice
Keith J. Pavilschek and Heidi Rolland
April 1, 1996
THE VALUE OF RELIGIOUS NONPROFIT service providers in helping to transform devastated lives is now largely undisputed in the welfare reform debate. This consensus was reflected in President Clinton's State of the Union appeal to government to enlist the help of charities—specifically including religious organizations—in providing social services to America's needy citizens. How government may channel this private-sector advantage for the public good generates far more heat.
The 1988 Supreme Court decision Bowen v. Kendrick, which considered whether Congress could constitutionally fund religiously based agencies under the Adolescent Family Life Act, seemed to open the way for faith-based service providers to participate in social welfare. Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the Court, declared that Congress' explicit requirement that religious agencies be included as potential grantees along with other private sector organizations was not itself unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that projects sponsored by the Act—pregnancy testing, adoption counseling and referral services, prenatal and postnatal care, etc.—are not themselves "specifically religious activities," nor are they "converted into such activities by the fact that they are carried out by organizations with religious affiliations." Similar federal programs followed suit in allowing faith-based organizations to compete for government grants to accomplish "secular" ends.
But distressing precedents also abound. In 1988 the courts forced a Catholic foster care agency to provide contraceptives to two teenage girls placed with them by the City of New York. In another case, a conservative Protestant adoption agency in California was told it could not favor conservative ...
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