Faith-Based Welfare Reform:
A Constitutional
Crises
Part
One
Welfare Reform
The door to President Bush’s faith-based
social welfare agenda was opened by the “charitable choice” clause. This clause came attached to key welfare
legislation enacted during the Clinton administration. Clinton declared that government welfare, as
defined at the time, was to end. The
subsequent legislation was the product of a bipartisan reform movement that
crystallized in the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. It replaced the long standing Aid to Families
with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF) program. The TANF
legislation marked a revolution in public welfare because it put a five-year
limit on welfare assistance and imposed strict work requirements on the
recipients. The
explicit economic goal was to reduce the number of people on welfare and
thereby cut the costs of sustaining a government funded welfare system. This was to be accomplished not only by
limiting how long anyone could stay on welfare, but also by emphasizing job
search and remedial education. These
latter elements were aimed at getting the recipients successfully installed in
the wage-earning mainstream.
Along
the way, however, PRWORA got tangled up with a political agenda of
disenfranchising the government welfare bureaucracy altogether. The strategy was to contract actual
administration of the services out to private sector organizations. The implicit goal was to move toward reducing
civil service workforce involvement to a mere oversight function. This is what sparked the PRWORA and
charitable-choice entanglement. The
defining political crucible was the ensuing argument that if secular
(non-religious) human service organizations could bid for administrative
rights, then existing “faith-based” charity organizations should be allowed to
bid as well. At that point, the question
really should have been, “why involve any private-sector organization, secular
or otherwise in the administration of government funded welfare?” The political incentives versus potential economic
and cultural inequities involve an issue more complex then might be readily apparent. For this reason, the crucial factors
underlying the politics of private sector involvement receive close attention
as this commentary progresses. The
intention is to demonstrate just how bad a legislative piece of work the
charitable-choice clause really is.
Further, it will show how dangerous it is to both the solvency of our
Constitution and to our civil rights as citizens and taxpayers.
One
of the selling points for allowing religious charities to participate in PRWORA
and TANF was the claim that it gave the welfare recipients a “charitable
choice” about who would administer their entitlements. However, it was never made clear just how to
accomplish this on a location-by-location basis. First, creating an equal
availability of secular and faith-based providers in every affected community
is virtually impossible. Even if
alternative provider organizations were available, the practical reality of any
kind of choice would be diminished due to the simple problem of achieving
neighborhood proximity to one or the other.
Even with this problem set aside, a real choice presupposes that all
recipients are informed about their options.
They could just as well end up directed to the nearest provider, or to
the one with the lowest caseload, or for some other reason amounting to a
biased referral. Even with this, there
is the more pressing matter of the specific religious affiliation of the
faith-based providers. With the great
diversity of religious persuasions in America, it is unrealistic to expect that
a truly impartial system of faith based choice could ever materialize. This observation brings the discussion around
to one of the hardest points of all.
The “charitable choice” clause was
justified by the further stipulation that participating faith-based charities
would not discriminate in their employee hiring practices. Nor would they use their status as
government-endorsed and funded providers to proselytize or otherwise exploit
the situation in the service of their religion.
To the contrary in fact, the “charitable choice” clause did relax some
of the existing restrictions against proselytization and discriminatory
hiring. This was to allow the charities
to “retain their religious character”.
As such, charitable choice was a corrupt idea from its inception. Where exactly was the legal line to be drawn
about discriminatory hiring and proselytization, and how was it to be
enforced? To make the situation even
graver, Bush’s executive orders and legislative initiatives aimed to further
shield the faith-based organizations from anti-discrimination laws! This agenda should be very troubling because
if faith-based providers can discriminate in their internal hiring practices,
then little doubt can exist that the welfare recipients will suffer
discrimination as well.
Bush clearly intended to eliminate as many
existing “barriers” to faith-based eligibility as he possibly could. Included among the target barriers is any
institutional mindset within government that would bias the selection processes
in favor of secular organizations (source). This is tantamount to directing the
government to brush aside the Constitution to actually favor faith-based
welfare providers (note). Unquestionably, the Christian charities would
be the predominant beneficiaries of the legislation. Although theoretically, it would seem that
the same competitive rights must be open to all organizations irrespective of religious
persuasion, denomination, or sect. The
implied equality of opportunity itself is a serious sticking point both inside
and outside the right-wing Christian camps.
Notably, the only religious charities
mentioned by the administration as potentially eligible were Christian, Jewish,
and to a more token extent Islamic organizations. Thus the initiative was corrupt from the
beginning because of a built-in favoritism toward the Abrahamic religions. This should immediately raise concerns about
the eligibility of other competitors from the Hindu, Buddhist, Asian American,
Native American, and Neo-pantheistic religious persuasions for instance. At least in theory, organizations like the Ku
Klux Clan, Black Muslims, and Church of Scientology should have been eligible
to compete (source). This puts the government in the extremely
awkward and constitutionally invalid role of arbitrating which “faith-based”
organizations are worthy of endorsement.
The likely political reality is that few if any organizations outside of
the Judeo-Christian linage would ever receive more than token
consideration. Consequently, a deluge of
lawsuits claiming biased selection policies are justifiably certain to
follow. For these reasons alone, both
the previous “charitable choice” clause and the present “faith-based”
legislation is constitutionally invalid and politically irresponsible. These are only the most visible factors that
make Bush’s welfare reform game unacceptable.