LAST WEEK, THE U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suspended a $75,000 grant to the Silver Ring Thing, a sexual abstinence program for teenagers, saying it was concerned that the program "may not have included adequate safeguards to clearly separate in time or location inherently religious activities from the federally funded activities."
The silver ring in the program's title refers to a ring worn by participants. It is inscribed with the message, "God wants you to be holy, so you should keep clear of sexual sin." The ACLU had charged that the Silver Ring Thing used "taxpayer dollars to promote religious content, instruction and indoctrination." A lawyer for the program, which has received about $1.3 million in federal funds since 2003, insisted that "any religious teaching that goes on is separate in time and place from what the government is funding."
I don't have the information to pronounce confidently on whether the Silver Ring Thing crossed the legal line. I have some sympathy, however, for those who would expect Washington to approve of abstinence rings with a religious inscription. That's because, from its inception, the campaign to provide government-funded social services through religious institutions has depended on two difficult-to-reconcile rationales.
One is a simple nondiscrimination principle: supporting equal access for religious groups to government social-service funding. As Bush put it in a speech to the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in 2002: "When it comes to the use of federal money, the days of discriminating against religious institutions simply because they are religious must come to an end."
But Bush also has flirted with a long-held principle of those who advocate subcontracting to faith groups such services as alcohol detoxification, prisoner rehabilitation and campaigns against teenage pregnancy. Their more grandiose justification is this: Precisely because they rely on religion to transform lives, faith-based initiatives are not just equal to but superior to their secular equivalents.
This paradigm is nicely illuminated in an anecdote about the Nixon hatchet-man-turned-evangelist Charles Colson.
In "Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed," Colson biographer Jonathan Aitken quotes Colson's description of his visit to a Brazilian prison run on Christian principles in which a cell once used for torture has only one occupant -- a large wooden crucifix that had been carved by the inmates. "He's doing time for all the rest of us," Colson's guide told him.
