"Suppose you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. First parent who comes says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman school' and you say 'Great, wonderful school. Here's your voucher.' Next parent who come says 'I want to send my child to the Jewish day school and you say 'Great, here's your voucher.' Next parent who comes says 'I want to send, my child to the private school that I've always dreamed of sending, my child to.' - 'Fine, here's your voucher.' Next parent who comes says 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of The White Supremacists' and you say 'Wait a minute, we're not giving you a voucher for that.' and the parent says 'Well, the way I read Genesis Cain was marked. Therefore I believe in white supremacy and, therefore, you gave it to a Catholic parent. You gave it to a Jewish parent. You gave it to a secular private school parent. Under the Constitution you can't discriminate against me.' So the next parent comes and says 'I want to send my child to the school of the Jihad.' [and you say], 'Wait a minute, we're not going to send a child with taxpayer dollars to the school of the Jihad.'- 'Well, you gave it to the Catholics, you gave it to the Jews, you gave it to the private secular people. You're going to tell me I can't ? I'm a taxpayer. Under the Constitution...' Now tell me, how are we going to make those kind of choices ?"

It was as if Senator Hillary Clinton had taken to publicly punching herself repeatedly in the head.

Clinton's voucher thought experiment was bizarrely schizoid in the context of her record. For over a decade, Clinton's stated positions and legislative backing have helped drive a long slide in American public opinion - away from strong support for the freedom-of-worship rights of religious and philosophical minorities and towards attitudes which favor American Christian civic religion and regard the type of questions Clinton raised, in her voucher thought experiment, as horrifying, ridiculous, absurd or even blasphemous : 'Put Catholics and Jews on the same plane as secularists, white supremacists and Jihadists ? Who the heck does she think she is ? That's nuts!' A slim majority of Americans now seem to feel that a moderate form of American Christian supremacy is constitutionally valid and Hillary Clinton has helped make that so.

Clinton's point on the constitutional perils of government school voucher programs would have been appropriate had she been a longstanding defender of strong defense of church-state separation, yet Hillary Clinton has been anything but:

In fact, Clinton has a track record of quietly  backing measures which entangle church and state, especially through her longstanding support for "Faith Based Initiatives". As quoted in a January 20, 2005 Boston Globe story, Clinton has stated that "There is no contradiction between support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles," and Clinton emphasized the need for religious Americas to have space to "live out their faith in the public square." Beyond just rhetorical support, Hillary Clinton has in fact been, since 1996, in the vanguard of support for legislative initiatives that have seriously compromised church-state separation to the point that organizations which practice religious discrimination in their hiring practices and have forced fundamentalist Christianity on prison inmates have received direct federal funding.

IN 1996, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported the "Charitable Choice" provisions, embedded in the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill, that made George W. Bush's "Faith Based Initiative" legally possible by making it legal for federal funds, allocated for the provision of social services, to go directly to sectarian religious groups. "Family"/"Fellowship" member David Kuo, who helped write the provisions [for John Ashcroft], described them as "radical" (in "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story Of Political Seduction"). There's some other very interesting and relevant context too: as detailed in an October 2007 Mother Jones story by Jeff Sharlet and Kathryne Joyce, Hillary's Prayer, Hillary Clinton's religious and political beliefs may be less liberal than some of her supporters think and it's worth considering Clinton's longstanding association with the fundamentalist group "The Fellowship" (or "The Family") that hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast and, as Jeff Sharlet details in his new book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart Of American Power due out May 20th, 2008, The Family/Fellowship has had as one of its central goals the undoing of Roosevelt's New Deal government programs - the group's agenda is elitist and it seeks to break down church state barriers. As Sharlet and Joyce summarize Clinton's relationship with the group,

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

Sharlet and Joyce state that Clinton's association with the group continues at least through 2005 and the two note early Clinton's role in helping pave the way for George W. Bush's "Faith Based Initiative":

Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons' approach to faith-based initiatives "set the stage for Bush." Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her book "Living History", had very kind words for the secretive leader of the Fellowship/Family Doug Coe, calling Coe ""is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.". In "Hillary's Prayer", Sharlet and Joyce describe the Reverend Rob Schenck's characterization of Clinton's ongoing assocation with the Family - [she] "has become a regular visitor to Coe's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance."

"Family" members were to be found at the heart of the successful effort, through the mid-1990's "Charitable Choice" provisions, to lay the legal groundwork for federal funds to flow directly to church groups -Family member David Kuo, later tapped as the second in command at the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives, helped draft one of the "Chararitable Choice" provisions which was then inserted into the 1996 Welfare Reform bill by Family member John Ashcroft. Hillary Clinton, not officially a Family member but the distinction may be mott given that, as Sharlet and Joyce describe, has ascended to the Family's most elite Senate 'prayer cell' provided important early backing for "Charitable Choice".

Prior to the 1996 "Charitable Choice" provisions, federal money had long gone to religious groups providing social services but legal barriers prohibited US government funds from flowing directly to churches or religious organizations per se. Those federal funds went, rather, to secular, nonprofit entities, set up by churches and religious groups, which received the money and provided the services and the system had worked well enough, for decades, that legal challenges were few.

"Charitable Choice" tore those barriers down, and Hillary Clinton cheered it on. As Don Dilulio has recently written, in Godly Republic,

Clinton championed the four 'charitable-choice laws' that her husband signed between 1996 and 1998, each one directing federal agencies to roll back constitutionally suspect limits on grants to religious nonprofit organizations that supply social services. On December 17, 2001, she spoke at a New York City church: "The Founders had . . . faith in God, from which the ability to reason is a gift. . . . Government works in partnership with religious institutions . . . feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless." On January 19, 2005, she preached before clergy in inner-city Boston: "But I ask you, who is more likely to go out onto a street to save some poor, at-risk child than . . . someone who believes in the divinity of every person, who sees God at work in the lives of even the most hopeless and left-behind of our children? And that's why we need to not have a false division or debate about the role of faith-based institutions; we need to just do it and provide the support that is needed on an ongoing basis." . . . .

--------------

Technically speaking, Hillary Clinton was forcefully making a trenchant point on the implications of church-state entanglement. But, as John Avarosis of Americablog has pointed out, Hillary Clinton's speech could be turned into a devastating political campaign ad were Clinton to win the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination, and there's good polling data to support Avarosis' point:

A 2007 First Amendment Center poll showed that a majority of Americans, 58%, did not believe that "the freedom to worship as one chooses ... applies to all religious groups".  56% percent of respondents, to a closely related question in the poll, believed that the constitutionally protected freedom-of-worship was "never meant to apply to religious groups that most people would consider extreme or fringe."

Nonetheless, many in the legal profession would consider Clinton's point to be on solid constitutional ground, and it lies at the heart of the dispute which has recently come before the United States Supreme Court in the Summum v. Pleasant Grove case, in which a Gnostic Christian sect in Utah, which believes it possesses commandments from God given to Moses before the Ten Commandments, a set of divine imperatives which the Summum sect wants to put up, as a stone monument, in a public park in the town of Pleasant Grove, Utah, which currently has a Ten Commandments monument.

By Hillary Clinton's logic, in her politically unfortunate school voucher thought experiment, the Summum sect should be able to erect its "Seven Aphorisms" monument in the Pleasant Grove park along with monuments erected by Buddhists, Jews, atheists or... white supremacists. But, a majority of Americans don't think so and the belief that America is at base a "Christian nation" tends to devolve towards a climate in which minorities, such as Jews or Muslims, who challenge open and sometimes even bigoted displays of public Christianity in public schools and elsewhere, can wind up harassed and persecuted, even subjected to death threats, and that's just what happened recently to some Jewish parents in southern Delaware in an incident that one blogger dubbed "The Indian River Pogrom".

In mid-2004 a dispute between the Jewish parents, of students in Delaware's Indian River Public school district, who challenged overt and sectarian Christian displays and anti-Jewish harassment of their children. Within the Indian River public schools, led two jewish families to sue the Indian River school district. In the ensuing escalation of hostilities one of the two families fled the area, amidst death threats, and put its house of eighteen years on the market.

It is unlikely that most of the residents of the overwhelmingly Christian Indian River area thought it was unreasonable for a Christian pastor, invited to a public high school graduation ceremony, to single out one Jewish graduating high school senior with the prayer, "I  pray for one specific student, that You be with her and guide her in the path that You have for her. And we ask all these things in Jesus' name and for his sake.": at least one poll suggests that was in accord with the new American national understanding of what religious freedom actually means.

Over the past decade, as two identical polls conducted by the First Amendment Center and separated by less than a decade have revealed, the Indian River communal reaction to Jewish complaints over local expressions of Christian civic religion were not much beyond the mainstream of national opinion because American pubic support for church-state separation seems to be waning, quite dramatically:

The Center's 2007 poll showed that 58% of Americans now believe that teachers and other public officials should be able to lead prayers in school and a substantial minority of 44%, up from 28% in 2000, do not believe that "the freedom to worship as one chooses ... applies to all religious groups". Further, a majority of 56% believes that the constitutionally protected freedom-of-worship was "never meant to apply to religious groups that most people would consider extreme or fringe."

So in light of that American majority opinion, the two Jewish families who objected to Christian prayers and religious displays in the Indian River public schools, were the ones who were out of line: they were unreasonable troublemakers.

The Indian River District's communal reaction to Jewish complaints over local expressions of Christian civic religion did not go very far beyond the mainstream of national opinion because American pubic support for church-state separation seems to be waning. In light of that American majority opinion, the two Jewish families who objected to Christian prayers and religious displays in the Indian River public schools, were the ones who were out of line: they were unreasonable troublemakers.

One can see such attitudes played out at the highest levels of American jurisprudence - in the oral arguments to the 2005 Van Order v. Perry case, over the presence of a Ten Commandments display on the Texas State House grounds, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia scoffed at attorney Erwin Chemerisnky's point that public Christian displays might make Jewish Americans feel disenfranchised. In Scalia's exchanges with Chemerisnky, the Supreme Court Justice expressed the belief, corrected by Chemerinsky, that Muslims accepted the Ten Commandments. Chemerinsky followed up by expressing that, "for that matter, Your Honor, if a Jewish individual would walk by this Ten Commandments, and see that the first commandment isn't the Jewish version, I am the Lord, thy God, took you out of Egypt, out of slavery, would realize it's not his or her government either." Chemerisnky's apparently heartfelt expression of what it meant to be Jewish in America was peremptorily dismissed by Scalia with the following comment, "You know, I think probably 90 percent of the American people believe in the Ten Commandments, and I'll bet you that 85 percent of them couldn't tell you what the ten are", which was met in the courtroom by raucous laughter.

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