Atheists sue to stop Christian mentoring
'Our Constitution was very purposefully written to be a godless document'
Posted: November 27, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
2004 WorldNetDaily.com
The Wisconsin-based atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation is suing to
cut off federal funding to a Christian child-mentoring program that helps
troubled kids.
Last year, the federal government awarded a $225,000 contract, part of $9
million awarded to 52 Arizona groups, to Phoenix-based MentorKids USA,
according to the Madison, Wisc.-based Capital Times.
The lawsuit, presided over by U.S. Judge John Shabaz, is demanding a summary
judgment that federal funding of the program cease until the government "has a
demonstrated plan in place to comply with its constitutional obligations,"
reports the Wisconsin paper.
Citing the First Amendment, the atheist foundation said, "Mentoring to convert
is not a suitable social service to be provided by the government," said the
report.
MentorKids USA was launched in 1997 by Orville Krieger, in partnership with
Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship, "to address the needs of at-risk youth in
the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area by matching caring Christian adults
with youth ages 8-17 who showed warning signs of becoming criminal offenders,"
says the Christian organization's website.
Originally called Phoenix MatchPoint, the group changed its name last January
to MentorKids USA. It has a long and successful track record in mentoring
children in trouble with the law, who have dysfunctional family backgrounds,
have been physically or sexually abused or who are involved with drug or
alcohol abuse. To date, MentorKids USA has helped over 500 kids.
In the program, mentors commit time each week to be a friend and role model for
an at-risk youth. The mentors "offer concrete expressions of unconditional love
and support to the mentee," says the group's website, "and the two participate
in activities designed to build friendship, trust, and constructive values."
Some of the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "legal accomplishments,"
according to its website, include:
Winning the first federal lawsuit challenging direct funding by the government
of a faith-based agency
Overturning a state Good Friday holiday
Winning a lawsuit barring direct taxpayer subsidy of religious schools
Removing Ten Commandments monuments and crosses from public land
Halting the Post Office from issuing religious cancellations
Ending 51 years years of illegal bible instruction in public schools
According to its website, the non-profit foundation was incorporated in
Wisconsin in 1978 and is "a national membership association of freethinkers:
atheists, agnostics and skeptics of any pedigree."
Why is it concerned with what it calls "state/church entanglement?"
"First Amendment violations are accelerating," says the group's website. "The
religious right is campaigning to raid the public till and advance religion at
taxpayer expense, attacking our secular public schools, the rights of
nonbelievers, and the Establishment Clause.
"The Foundation recognizes that the United States was first among nations to
adopt a secular Constitution. The founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution
wanted citizens to be free to support the church of their choice, or no
religion at all. Our Constitution was very purposefully written to be a godless
document, whose only references to religion are exclusionary.
"It is vital to buttress the Jeffersonian 'wall of separation between church
and state' which has served our nation so well."
But William Rehnquist, current chief justice of the United States Supreme
Court, says this view put forth by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the
ACLU and similar groups is a fiction and mockery of the true meaning of the
First Amendment.
The Establishment Clause, explained Rehnquist in a 1985 opinion, "forbade
establishment of a national religion, and forbade preference among religious
sects or denominations. … The Establishment Clause did not require government
neutrality between religion and irreligion nor did it prohibit the Federal
Government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to religion. There is simply no
historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build
the 'wall of separation' [between church and state]."
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