UNWORTHY OF COHENHOOD:

What Mr. Jefferson Would Think of Ms. Myles's Addiction Program (ADAM COHEN, 3/09/03, NY Times)

"Holy, Holy/Are You Lord God Almighty," a Christian rock band sings, as the crowd sways, palms in the air. The music stops, and a preacher with a microphone speaks. "God, you are bigger than any addiction! You are bigger than any crack cocaine, you are bigger than any beer, than any pornography!"

It is Friday night at Healing Place Church, and Tonja Myles is presiding over one of the most controversial church services in America. It is a meeting of a "Christ centered" addiction-treatment program, led by the woman who has become the face of the Bush administration's campaign to send tax dollars to faith-based social service providers. Ms. Myles was President Bush's special guest at the State of the Union address in January, when he asked Congress for $600 million over three years to finance vouchers for addiction programs, including religious ones.

Faith-based social services are the latest missile the Bush administration has fired at the wall between church and state. Earlier this year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to allow tax dollars to be used to build churches, as long as part of the building is used for social services. I decided to head to Baton Rouge to see Ms. Myles's program firsthand. For airplane reading, I brought Thomas Jefferson's writings on religion, including his famous reply to the Danbury Baptist Association, which introduced the now-classic formulation of a "wall of separation" between church and state. [...]

Backers of faith-based initiatives say that rules against state support for religion are a recent invention of activist judges. But when the Supreme Court handed down a landmark church-state case in 1947, it was careful to ground its decision in the words of our third president.

Jefferson was hardly hostile to religion. In his first Inaugural Address, he called God "an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter." But when the Danbury Baptist Association, a Connecticut religious group, asked him to declare a national fast day, he refused, citing his conviction that "religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God," and his view of the First Amendment as "building a wall of separation between church and state."

Jefferson saw freedom of conscience as paramount. "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful," he wrote in "A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom." He also feared that if the churches were united with government, the result would be tyranny. The power of organized religion, Jefferson once wrote, "has been severely felt by mankind, and has filled the history of ten or twelve centuries with too many atrocities not to merit a proscription from meddling with government." [...]

Supporters of faith-based initiatives accuse opponents of being anti-religion. But it is the Bush administration that denigrates religion by presenting it as simply another "option," no different from secular choices like Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers. Jefferson insisted on the need for a wall between church and state not because he failed to appreciate religion, but because he understood its power all too well.

Never mind that Alcoholics Anonymous isn't secular, this is diabolical. The very point of such cases is that they had to abandon the text of the Constitution, which Mr. Jefferson had no hand in writing, and go fishing in extra-constitutional materials in order to overturn settled American law and tradition and erect an anti-constitutional "wall of separation".

By contrast, here's George Washington's first Inaugural Address--it too is extra-constitutional, but he at least presided over the Constitutional Convention:

[I]t would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge. In tendering this homage to the Great Author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own, nor those of my fellow-citizens at large less than either. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency; and in the important revolution just accomplished in the system of their united government the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many distinct communities from which the event has resulted can not be compared with the means by which most governments have been established without some return of pious gratitude, along with an humble anticipation of the future blessings which the past seem to presage. These reflections, arising out of the present crisis, have forced themselves too strongly on my mind to be suppressed. You will join with me, I trust, in thinking that there are none under the influence of which the proceedings of a new and free government can more auspiciously commence.

Does Mr. Cohen really want to play inaugural mumblety-peg?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 9, 2003 7:50 AM