A tax bill amendment proposed by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) that would have re-authorized a school voucher program in D.C. was defeated 55-42 late Tuesday. The Washington Post has more:

Tuesday's ... vote was widely seen as one of the final chances for the program to be extended beyond the students who are already currently enrolled. Funding will continue for current students until they graduate high school, but has been cut off to new students for a year.

We can only hope this was indeed the final chance for the program, which continues to get chance after chance in Congress, despite suffering continual defeats the last couple of years.

[UPDATE: I failed to mention! The Baptist Joint Committee sent out letters to members of the U.S. Senate urging the defeat of this amendment. Kudos to the Senate for listening, and once again doing the right thing on this issue.]

World Relief is a relief organization that helps refugees all over the globe settle in their new country, including in the United States, where the group is headquartered. Driven by a religious commitment to aid the poor and the needy, World Relief seeks to follow the example of Christ and "serve those who are suffering from poverty and injustice."

But they also receive "up to 70%" of their funding from the U.S. government through grants, which means they also have a responsibility not to use that money to proselytize or indoctrinate those they serve. And (as the BJC and other groups continue to urge) it should mean that they may not use those funds to create jobs that are subject to religious discrimination in hiring. Under current administration policy, though, World Relief can and does refuse to hire non-Christians. And real life people who may otherwise be perfect for a service-providing job funded by taxpayers are being denied simply because of their faith:

To [Saad] Mohammad Ali, it seems unusual that he could serve as a volunteer and later as a paid contractor for World Relief, but can't be employed there.

His frustration is not with local workers who advocated for him and even sought an exception on his behalf from the agency's headquarters, he said, but with a policy he finds in conflict with everything he's learned about this country.

"I've heard over and over again that in the U.S., discrimination in any form is not accepted," he said.

"So it was a disappointment."

Ali, an Iraqi refugee with a degree in statistics who is fluent in English and Arabic, has worked for the U.S. as an interpreter and was qualified and prepared to do valuable work assisting other refugees from the Middle East. Essentially given the choice of meaningful publicly-funded employment or maintaining his faith, he is now a baggage handler at the Seattle International Airport.

The Baptist Joint Committee filed a brief with the Supreme Court in the case of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, which is scheduled to be heard next month. They urge the court to take a strong stand for the autonomy of religious organizations, but also to uphold the principle of church-state separation when it comes to funding. (Read the brief here.)

I had the opportunity to interview BJC General Counsel Holly Hollman about the filing and the important factors in this case, starting with the very basics - what is it all about? Read her answers in the extended post.

Columnist Charles Haynes discusses the newest efforts to insert religious viewpoints into science curricula.

Consider Kentucky, where the Legislature is considering a bill that would encourage “open and objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories being studied.” That means, according to the bill, critiquing the science supporting “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
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The language of the Kentucky bill may be confusing (what can it possibly mean for any scientific theory to have “disadvantages”?), but the intent is clear: Teach students to be skeptical of what the vast majority of scientists tell us about evolution, climate change and other science topics studied in school.

 The Kentucky bill is HB 397, currently in the House Education Committee. As Haynes notes, similar bills have passed in Louisiana and Texas.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reports on an item in the budget that passed the Kentucky House last week. Representatives from Breathitt County secured $100,000 for equipment and educational materials for Riverside Christian School.

This appropriation - which the Jefferson County Teachers Association President called "a lawsuit waiting to happen" - comes while we wait for the state's Supreme Court to decide a case questioning the legality of public money used for scholarships to the Baptist University of the Cumberlands.

The proposed appropriation for Riverside Christian underscores the importance of the high court’s pending action in the Cumberlands case, said David Tachau, attorney for the plaintiffs.

“Now the legislature is proposing a direct subsidy of $100,000 to a school who proclaims that their ‘mission’ is ‘to lead each student to Christ,’ ” Tachau said, quoting the first line of the school’s mission statement posted on its Web site. “This time there’s no effort to pretend the money would be used for non-religious purposes.”

A divided panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's use of the phrase "under God" to be constitutional. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The daily schoolroom ritual is not a prayer, but instead "a recognition of our founders' political philosophy that a power greater than the government gives the people their inalienable rights," said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in a 2-1 ruling.

"Thus, the pledge is an endorsement of our form of government, not of religion or any particular sect."

The dissenting judge, Stephen Reinhardt, said statements by members of Congress who added "under God" to the pledge in 1954 show conclusively that it was intended to "indoctrinate our nation's children with a state-held religious belief."

In a separate case, the court ruled 3-0 that "In God We Trust" does not constitute an illegal endorsement of religion inscribed on national currency. You can read the pledge decision here. The currency opinion is here. 

The Texas Board of Education voted 10-5 yesterday against a proposal to teach high school students about the constitutional separation of church and state. Apparently some are hoping if we don't teach about it, it will just go away.

Board members defeated an amendment by member Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, that would have required students to examine the reasons the Founding Fathers "protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others." 
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But many religious conservatives – including a board-appointed curriculum expert – contend that separation of church and state was established in the law only by activist judges and not the Constitution or Bill of Rights.

Republicans said Knight's proposed requirement was based on an inaccurate interpretation of what the Founding Fathers wanted.

[UPDATE: The Board has voted 10-5 to approve changes to the Social Studies curriculum. The NYTimes reports:

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

The Texas Freedom Network offers this press release in response.]

Two somewhat opposing views on that question. First up, AU's Barry Lynn, argues that nothing has changed:

During his presidential campaign, Obama specifically promised that "if you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them -- or against the people you hire -- on the basis of their religion."

This sounded pretty unequivocal. But more than a year has gone by since Obama set up his Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and no substantive policy has been changed, least of all discriminatory hiring.

Melissa Rogers - who led the President's Faith-Based Advisory Council in crafting a report of recommendations for the White House - responds, making the case that lots is about to change:

Beyond the council's unanimous endorsement [of reform recommendations], these proposals also received support from an array of national organizations, including Barry Lynn's Americans United for Separation of Church and State. And Lynn served on a task force the Advisory Council established to develop these and others recommendations. His helpful suggestions strengthened our work.

But in recent comments on the council's report, Lynn and Americans United hardly mention these important reforms. Instead, they focus narrowly on a few other items, one of which is a significant issue the council was instructed not to address: the practice of allowing religious groups to make religion-based employment decisions in government-funded jobs. The White House decided to deal with that issue outside the scope of the council process.
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If the administration implements our recommendations in this area swiftly, and those rules are especially durable given the fact that they are supported by such a broad constituency, won't that be a great victory? I think so.

Thomas Farr, former head of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom, writes in today's Washington Post to protest the Obama Administration's failure to - as he sees it - live up to the promise of the Cairo speech with a real focus on religious liberty. He points to rhetorical trends in the President's diplomatic language that more often mentions the "freedom to worship" and not the "freedom of religion" (a move Farr interprets to refer to freedom that is only assured inside houses of worship, and not outside).

Primarily, though, his concern is the President's not having nominated an ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, a position created by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton.

Congress recognized that the State Department would likely resist giving much attention to international religious freedom, which is why the IRF Act was passed in the first place. The statute made explicit Congress' intent that the religious freedom ambassador be given at least the status of other ambassadors at large by establishing the position as "principal advisor to the President and the Secretary of State."
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Not only have the State Department's other ambassadors at large been in place for many months, but a whole platoon of other senior foreign policy officials are now at work -- for example, envoys for Global AIDS, Disabilities, Climate Change, Guantanamo, Global Partnerships, International Energy Affairs, Muslim Communities, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Farr recommends, in addition, that the administration adopt the foreign policy proposals of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.