In welcoming a Senate compromise on federal funding for "faith-based" social services, President Bush has implicitly recognized that his original proposal presented practical and constitutional problems.
Last week Mr. Bush described as "a great accomplishment" a bipartisan proposal by Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. The Charity Aid, Recovery and Empowerment Act of 2002 would cost the federal treasury about $12 billion in expenditures and lost tax receipts over two years.
Unlike Mr. Bush's original proposal and legislation already passed by the House, the Santorum-Lieberman legislation defuses a controversy over whether Congress might be put in the position of subsidizing religious discrimination by charities that received government contracts.
Gone from the Senate bill are such "charitable choice" provisions, modeled after a pilot program in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. While the Senate version provides some additional block-grant funds, its emphasis is on making it easier for citizens to receive tax advantages for their own gifts to religious charities. Such indirect support of religious charities through the tax system is a long-established practice in this country.
The president originally envisioned a much more ambitious "faith-based" initiative in which religiously affiliated charities would find it easier to obtain government contracts for social services. The president and his allies insisted, with some justice, that he was building on a history of partnerships between government and organizations like Catholic Charities and church-related hospitals.
But concerns that an expansion of "charitable choice" would lead to new entanglements between government and religion were raised -- not just by civil libertarians but also by Christian conservatives who worried that programs whose basic philosophy was religious would be entering a devil's bargain by accepting federal contracts.
As the Rev. Pat Robertson put it: "This thing could be a real Pandora's box ... what seems to be such a great initiative can rise up to bite the organizations as well as the federal government."
It didn't help the initiative when it was disclosed last summer that the Salvation Army has asked the Bush administration to insulate it from state and local laws barring employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The furor over the suggestion, which the White House said it had rejected, dramatized the delicacy of subcontracting social services to religious institutions. On that point, it seems Mr. Bush is beginning to see the light.
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