To my surprise I received a call from the News Tribune Friday afternoon informing me that a complaint had been filed by the Americans for the Separation of Church and State to the Obama Administration asking that a $350,000 grant to the Rescue Mission for our Adams St. Family Campus be revoked.
Here is the article on the News Tribune website
While I’m not going to respond officially to the complaint unless asked to by the Administration, I do have a few thoughts on the subject.
1. Christians must not be discriminated against. We have just as much right to build shelters for homeless families as any other group and any suggestion otherwise must be challenged.
2. Providing we abide by the rules/laws of such funding, we should be able to apply and use public funds when we provide a public service, which we most certainly do.
You can see my other responses to the charges in the article linked. Tell me what you think.
DC
Official policy is that federal funds are not to be used to finance religious activity, so if the money is going to functions that are not religious, there are no grounds for complaint. If you feel you’re being discriminated against you can contact the American Center for Law and Justice (www.ACLJ.org), and they champion those types of anti-JudeoChristian attacks.
It’s perfectly okay for religous institutions to receive funds for non-religious services. And that doesn’t mean they have to change their mission statement. They better have a basis for the accusations or else it sounds like a serious case of public slander to me (getting into the paper and all.) If funds are clearly separated by funding sources and use, I’m surprised they would go for that kind of action.
Besides, religious institutions have always been the leader in community services. To strike at religious institutions serving the poor is to attack the poor’s best resource for assistance. Seems pretty destructive and counterproductive to the community as a whole, to me.
And why don’t you ever hear of them attacking institutions of another faith? I’ve never heard of them targetting health and wellness clinics that use alternative healing methods.
While I fully believe in the separation of church and state, groups like TPM are essential to helping the poor. It doesn’t bother me that the government was asked to investigate because I’m sure you’re not breaking the law.
Although I think the federal government is spending way too much money, which we collectively don’t have, this complaint is just plain ridiculous. It doesn’t seem to have much, if any merit, especially since Dirks and the administration, both of the same political party, seem to have approved the money. Hopefully this latest tactic will only backfire on this group and its leader, who I have viewed as a very big joke for a very long time.