Posted: 09/03/05

Americans United for Separation of Church and State versus Prison Fellowship Ministry, Chipping Away at Our Democratic Republic

[Note – This article originally appeared in print in January 2005.  It remains timely, and we wanted to re-print this piece here for you on Christianworldviewnetwork.  This writing is also available in Steven Voigt's latest book, Letters to America, which is a collection of his opinion editorials from the past year.]

In early 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State ("AUSCS"), often the ally of the ACLU in lawsuits, filed its own action against Prison Fellowship Ministry, a non-profit entity, challenging Prison Fellowship Ministry's operation of a voluntary faith-based rehabilitation program for inmates in Iowa's Newton Correctional Facility.  In the lawsuit, AUSCS argued that Prison Fellowship Ministry's Newton program violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.¹

Perhaps the only positive aspect of this ridiculous lawsuit was that it highlighted and exposed the depressing agenda that drives the radical left.  Using lawyers and lawsuits, AUSCS and like-minded groups are waging a secular jihad against faith.

To illustrate the left's assault upon American values, I need go no farther than the Complaint filed by AUSCS against Prison Fellowship Ministry. In its federal lawsuit, AUSCS complained:

"Approximately 200 Iowa prison inmates participate in the InnerChange program [the voluntary faith-based rehabilitation program].  The participating inmates are housed in a separate unit in Newton. InnerChange runs virtually every aspect of this unit except for security.  The InnerChange program is pervasively sectarian. During nearly all their waking hours, participants are subjected to intensive, evangelical, Biblically based instruction from a Christian fundamentalist standpoint.  Each inmate's day starts with morning prayer.  Most of an inmate's day consists of taking part in InnerChange's evangelical, fundamentalist, Biblically-based classes and programming.  The walls in the Newton unit that houses participating inmates are lines with scripture.  Program staff pray with participating inmates.  Chapel service is

mandatory on Sundays." ²

So the bottom line is that some folks who want - and need - faith, structure and hope in their lives must now contend with lawyers.  Want God?  Well, here's a lawsuit instead.  What has the world come to?

Each day while you put in eight meaningful hours to put bread on your family's table, our democracy morphs a little more into something unrecognizable.  Idle left-wing lawyers and elitists have plenty of time to concoct new schemes to chip away at the values that hold your family together.  The extremists know their agenda can never succeed with a popular vote, so instead they pack the courthouse with nutty lawsuits.  Unfortunately, if a judge happens to agree (even once) with their ideas, then these groups win, their ideas become untouchable law, and democracy loses.

If your elected legislators are not resisting this legal assault on faith by AUSCS and similar groups, if your legislators are not fighting to protect the power of your vote and the principles of democracy, if your legislators are not calling for a return to a government of three equal and distinct branches, if your legislators are not standing resolute - shoulder to shoulder - with the men and women of Prison Fellowship Ministry, then you need to look them straight in the eye and question whether they truly represent your values on Capitol Hill.  If they do not, make sure they know your opinion.  If they do not listen to you, boot them out of office.

Prison Fellowship Ministry's Program in Newtown Provides Tangible Benefits to Iowa's Citizens

The mission of Prison Fellowship Ministry is good and noble - plus, it works.  Charles Colson, the group's founder, explained the tangible impact of this program:

"After a two-week evangelistic crusade through every prison in North Carolina, disciplinary violations dropped precipitously, and most wardens reported reduced tensions and better inmate behavior.  Even months later, Bible studies were crowded, and lives continued to be changed.  In New York state prisons, recidivism (the rate at which released prisoners return to prison) was dramatically reduced - from an average of 41 percent to 14 percent - among men who participated in at least ten Prison Fellowship

programs a year."³

Thus, beyond the commendable goal of encouraging faith, Prison Fellowship Ministry saves taxpayers money by keeping people out of jail.  It turns lives around by assisting individuals to become productive members of society.

AUSCS Trumpets an Improper Reading of the Establishment Clause

AUSCS opines that Prison Fellowship Ministry violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  AUSCS is wrong.

Simply put, the Establishment Clause states that our nation can never have a national religion and citizens are free to worship God as they choose.  Commenting on the Establishment Clause in 1859, Justice Joseph Story penned, "the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion, will hardly be contested by any persons, who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well-being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice." ⁴  Likewise, Justice William Douglas wrote, "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being . . .. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities . . . it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs." ⁵

When read properly, the Establishment Clause is limited in scope.  Liberals who want their ideas made into untouchable law, however, choose to paste their own ideas onto the plain words of the clause.  As with other parts of the Constitution, left-wingers like to read additional words like "wall of separation of church and state" into the First Amendment that are found nowhere in the text or even in the Founders' intent.  In fact, the Establishment Clause of the Constitution permits - and our Founding Fathers considered it permissible and even proper - for religion and religious values to find a place in a just government.

Lawsuits Like AUSCS's Action Against Prison Fellowship Ministry Infringe upon the Domain of Individual States

At one time in our history, individuals and states had the power to decide the vast majority of moral issues. For example, before Roe v. Wade, individual states regulated abortion in different ways. The law in New York was different than the law in Georgia. Today, liberal lawyers skew the plain words of various Constitutional Amendments to add their own political agenda into the text, with the ultimate goal of mandating their partisan agenda on us all, bypassing the democratic voting process. Without even blinking, the Founding Fathers would have rejected this radical, chaotic use of the federal judiciary to dictate the law-making process of individual states. James Madison wrote:

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and well defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State." ⁶

This, of course, is consistent with the Tenth Amendment, which states:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

What REALLY Drives AUSCS?

AUSCS has a financial reason to continue pressuring schools, counties, and now, non-profit missionary groups, to align with its secularist reading of our Constitution and laws.  The attorneys of the AUSCS have virtually created steady-paying jobs for themselves by winning their attorneys' fees in religion cases where they assert their incorrect reading of the Constitution.⁷

To get its fees, AUSCS pleads an incorrect reading of a federal fee-shifting statute related to attorneys' fees - 42 U.S.C. §1988. When Congress contemplated this fee-shifting exception three decades ago, it never conceived that the statute would be used by radical groups to fund costly secular litigation campaigns against schools and non-profits.  The statute provides a narrow exception to the standard known as the "American Rule," where each party pays its own fees and costs, regardless of outcome of the lawsuit. Under the fee-shifting statute, 42 U.S.C. §1988, the loser pays the prevailing party's costs. Congress intended this statute to apply to civil rights abuses, including certain race and sex discrimination cases, but not to lawsuits over religion, such as the AUSCS's lawsuit against Prison Fellowship Ministry.

During the deliberations on the bill, the Senate penned that "in many cases arising under our civil rights laws, the citizen who must sue to enforce the law has little or no money with which to hire a lawyer." ⁸  In the recent First Amendment lawsuits, the tables are turned.  Those sued by the AUSCS (or the ACLU) can defend the lawsuit but they risk paying the AUSCS's attorneys' fees if the AUSCS prevails.  For a typical case, this could be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, obviously more than any non-profit could sustain.  The alternative is to voluntarily submit to the radical agenda of the AUSCS.

Who will be the Next Victim of the Legal Assault?

In addition to Prison Fellowship Ministry, AUSCS sued the warden of the Newton Correctional Facility as well as the directors and the board members of the Iowa Board of Corrections.  For sure, radical groups such as AUSCS intend to intimidate all Americans with the specter of lawsuits.  If this is not true - if AUSCS filed the lawsuit simply to make a point (albeit a wrong one) - why then does it seek to recover its attorneys' fees from the hard-working men and women who run the Newton Correction facility?

Believe me, you or somebody you know could be sued next.  After this lawsuit is over, AUSCS will not quietly disappear.  It will collect its money and simply move on to the next target.

What Can We Do?

The message of the radical left is clear. Submit to the left-wing agenda or else face lawsuits and big money legal fees. The response should be equally simple - Resist!

Here are four ways for you to engage in this battle today:

1.      Pray for the men and women of Prison Fellowship Ministry and others in the crosshairs of the AUSCS and the ACLU legal machines.

2.      Call, write or email your congressional representatives to encourage them to stand firm against overreaching lawyers and lawsuits that are chipping away at legislative authority.

3.      Call, write or email your congressional representatives and tell them that you support amending the fee shifting statute (42 U.S.C. § 1988) to make it absolutely clear that attorneys are not entitled to fee awards in lawsuits over religion.

4.      Call, write or email your congressional representatives to let them know that you expect them to back President Bush's nomination of strict constructionists to the judicial bench - judges who will enforce the law, not make new law, which is the province of the legislature.

Notes:

1.                  AUSCS claimed this is a federal offense because the state defrays some of Prison fellowship's operational expenses. See First Amended Complaint ¶¶ 30-42, Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, No. 4:03-cv-90074, (Southern District of Iowa 2004)

2.                  Id. at ¶ 27.

3.                  Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, Now How Shall We Live? (1999), citing B.R. Johnson, D.B. Larson, and T.C. Pitts, "Religious Programs, Institutional Adjustment, and Recidivism among Former Inmates in Prison Fellowship Programs," Justice Quarterly 14 no. 1 (Mar. 1997): 145.

4.                  Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, A Familiar Exposition of the United States: Containing a Brief Commentary (New York, Harper & Brothers 1859).

5.                  Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952).

6.                  The Federalist No. 45: Madison (Jan. 26, 1788).

7.                  For more information about the fees taken by AUSCS and the ACLU taken from the pockets of hard-working Americans, please read Steven T. Voigt, No Political Solution No Political Messiah (Infinity, 2004).

8.                  42 U.S.C. §1988 (Senate deliberations on bill).

About Steven T. Voigt:

Steven T. Voigt is a lawyer with a premier law firm that has offices throughout the United States and Europe. After receiving his juris doctorate, Steven served as a judicial clerk to the Pennsylvania appellate court for one year before entering private practice. Steven is the executive director of Foundations of Law PAC, www.foundationsoflawpac.org, and the legal and public policy advisor to AmericanDestiny.com.

Steven has authored numerous academic law reviews, commentaries, and publications related to national public policy and law, including the books Letters to America, TYRANNY The Collapse of Traditional Law in America, and No Political Solution No Political Messiah.

To read more of Steven's works, please also visit www.VoigtonAmerica.us. To receive Steven's free monthly e-commentary related to policy and law, send your name and e-mail address to info@&ltNOSPAM>voigtonamerica.us with "subscribe" in the subject line.

The views expressed in the following articles belong to Steven T. Voigt personally and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer, any entity he is associated with, or any forum where this is published.

© Copyright 2005 Steven T. Voigt

Steven Voigt