This passed right by me in all the business of the last few days:
WASHINGTON — In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that an atheist organization lacked taxpayer standing to challenge a White House conference that informed both faith-based and secular organizations about federal funding for programs that help the poor. ADF attorneys authored a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the Supreme Court in the case.
“Simply being offended by religion does not allow a taxpayer to run to a court and have the government stop something he or she doesn’t like,” said ADF Senior Counsel Jordan Lorence, who authored the brief along with ADF Legal Counsel Dale Schowengerdt. “In pushing their radical and exclusionary agenda, the Freedom from Religion Foundation put their extreme view of the Establishment Clause ahead of the pressing need for compassionate efforts by faith-based organizations to help the less fortunate. Real people would have suffered if the atheists’ lawsuit would have been allowed to move forward.”
The White House conferences informed charitable groups, both secular and faith-based, about existing federal grant programs to help the poor and how to apply for such grants. The Freedom from Religion Foundation believes that the Establishment Clause bars faith-based charities from receiving government funding, so they filed suit against the White House as taxpayers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled that the taxpayers had standing to challenge the conference and allowed the case to proceed. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed in January on behalf of We Care America, a faith-based organization with affiliates in 28 states, ADF attorneys asked the Supreme Court to enforce federal standing requirements--which require that plaintiffs demonstrate concrete injury--in Establishment Clause cases. ADF attorneys argued that this is necessary to protect faith-based ministries from ongoing and unnecessary legal attacks from the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom from Religion Foundation, and other like-minded groups.
In Monday’s decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that what the members of Freedom from Religion Foundation are proposing “would enlist the federal courts to superintend, at the behest of any federal taxpayer, the speeches, statements, and myriad daily activities of the President, his staff, and other Executive Branch officials.” The court therefore concluded that the mere fact that the plaintiffs are taxpayers is not sufficient grounds to bring a lawsuit against the White House program.
It might be time to bring a really good Church/State case to the Supreme Court - one of those obnoxious suits routinely brought by a kook atheist aided by the ACLU; like that one from San Diego a bit a go where someone claimed to be offended by a cross on a mountain. We do need a ruling stating that you don't have a right to not be offended - but we also need a ruling which enforces the First Amendment's protections of free exercise; which means that we, the people, can practice our religion even on public property as long as we don't interfere with necesary government functions or deliberately and permanently exclude other groups from using the same sort of property in the same manner.
One of the problems in our Church/State debates is that the people on the other side are amazingly ignorant of what is actually at stake. The position of the secularist left is summed up by the bumper sticker "the last time we mixed Church and State we burned people at the stake". It is an idiocy peculiar to the modern leftwing secularist that the fact we once erred in one direction means we must now err in the other direction. Its the same mentality which informs those who support affirmative action: since we once discriminated against black Americans, we must now discriminate in favor of them.
It was the modern, liberal, democratic nation-State which first issued a passport - which first, as it were, required someone to get permission to enter another nation. It is liberalism which boxes us up - boxes us up and tries to keep us ignorant and distracted in order to better control us. It is the Church which stands athwart this. For all of liberalism's claim to be the path to freedom, it is the Church which really makes men free - and makes them brothers in a way that no State ever can. At my church, the priest is from Sri Lanka; one of the men who is helping me with my continuing religious education is from the Philipines; I frequently take the Eucharist from a black man - and it is all so trivial, the supposedly deep and lasting divisions between peoples...but they are divisions created out of whole cloth.
When a State interferes with a Church, that is oppression - it is the State trying to prevent people from doing what they wish. On the other hand, when the Church brings pressure on the State, it is the Church trying to relieve the people. The Church - and this really means all the religions - comes before the State and asks it to stop doing things by force to people; the State comes before the people and tries to tell them to stop doing what they have volunteered to do. The difference is very distinct - and the cases we need to bring are not the supposed oppression caused by a religious symbol on public property, but on the very real oppression of a massive State which seeks to leave the individual naked in the public square and unable to defend himself against the all-powerful government. This case is a very small step in the right direction - and we need to take many, many more.