Addressing the Members of Congress directly, he testified that Charitable choice will mean that the Episcopal Church, the AME Zion Church, and local mosque will be competing against each other for grants. And, of course, politics will often determine who gets these grants and that means that it is the smaller, minority religious groups who are likely to be left out, Saperstein contended. Turning to the constitutional and legal issues involved with charitable choice, Saperstein pointed out that, the Supreme Court of the United States has never upheld direct government cash support for pervasively sectarian institutions. Indeed, in cases where the High Court and other courts have upheld some type of government support for religious institutions, they have gone out of their way to distinguish it from exactly the kind of direct government subsidy of houses of worship and religious ministries and parochial schools that is entailed in charitable choice. The Supreme Court has noted that in houses of worship, religion is so subsumed in the entire program that it cannot be separated out, and since funding is fungible, a major program of support to any part of the institution will constitute government funding of religion, thereby violating the Establishment Clause, observed Saperstein.
Common sense says the justices are right.
And because support to any part of the institution is support to all of it, such government funding violates what has been a first principle of the First Amendment. Saperstein addressed the civil rights implications of permitting religious organizations to discriminate in employment with government funds, which current charitable choice proposals would allow. Major government funding for programs with such exemptions may be constitutional but such a program can be part of a campaign to weaken civil rights and will give government sanction for dividing America along religious lines, argued Saperstein. Government money should not be used to discriminate against protected classes of people. To grant the exemption, with anything more than incidental government funding behind it, is to turn back the clock on civil rights in this country, allowing for widespread discrimination on the basis of religious identity and practice.