02-13-2003, 12:25 PM
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#1
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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Lawsuit challenges faith based prison program
Amercans United for Separation of Church and State Sues Christian Program at Iowa Prison
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The lawsuits, brought by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington-based advocacy group, are intended to provoke a constitutional challenge to the president's religion-based initiative, under which federal and state governments would give more money to religious groups that work with poor people, addicts, the unemployed and prisoners.
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, said of the Iowa prison project: "This program contains everything that is also wrong with the president's faith-based initiative. It uses tax dollars for pervasively religious programs, allows discriminatory hiring, gives preferential treatment to one religion over others, funds coercive conversion efforts and basically ignores the whole notion of a separation between church and state."
Prison Fellowship maintains that its program is constitutional because the state money is used only for secular parts of the program and because prisoners choose to participate.
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Staff members and volunteers in the program, known as the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, are required to sign a statement of faith in a biblical literalist interpretation of Christianity. The lawsuits argue that this is tantamount to employment discrimination.
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Washington Post article
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The program is funded, in part, with revenue from phone charges on the general inmate population. Iowa Department of Corrections spokesman Fred Scaletta said, "No state dollars, including telephone monies, are used in the religious component of the program." But the lawsuits contend that it is impossible to separate the religious and secular portions of a program that describes itself as "Christ-centered" 24 hours a day.
The suits also say the privileges given to InnerChange participants amount to incentives to convert to fundamentalist Christianity.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA who generally takes a supportive view of faith-based programs, said that if the courts accept the description of the program in the lawsuits, it is likely to be struck down. Even setting aside the issue of state funding, he said, "the offer of various benefits that are unavailable to others is an indirect form of coercion that is clearly impermissible."
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AU press release
AU FAQ
AU's primary named Plaintiff is a Mormon who objects to the fundamentalist Christian character of the program. Other plaintiffs are relatives of prisoners; the program is financed with an extra charged on all phone calls to the prison, so all prisoners must help finance this program even if it violates their beliefs.
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