{"id":7726,"date":"2004-03-13T09:48:47","date_gmt":"2004-03-13T09:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/steinfels_on_government_and_religion.html"},"modified":"2004-03-13T09:48:47","modified_gmt":"2004-03-13T09:48:47","slug":"steinfels_on_government_and_religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/steinfels_on_government_and_religion.html","title":{"rendered":"Steinfels on government and religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, did the Legislature’s criteria for deciding what activities or institutions deserve a religious exemption constitute a state intrusion into religious matters that was prohibited by the First Amendment?<\/p>\n

The California court ruled no, by 6 to 1. Yet it is noteworthy that the criteria that disqualified Catholic Charities in California from a religious exemption are precisely the ones regularly hailed by those who felt that the existing relationship between government and religious organizations was satisfactory and did not need the White House’s religion-based initiative. <\/p>\n

Catholic Charities did not limit to Catholics either its hiring or its social services. It did not proselytize. And it was organized as a type of nonprofit corporation distinct from the church. This was the kind of well-tested model that critics of the religion-based initiative urged on churches that wanted to qualify for government aid to expand their activities on behalf of the needy. Is the cost of that model, as the California statute indicates, a loss of religious organizations’ ability to be guided by their own beliefs, especially in regard to dealing with employees? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here In other words, did the Legislature’s criteria for deciding what activities or institutions deserve a religious exemption constitute a state intrusion into religious matters that was prohibited by the First Amendment? The California court ruled no, by 6 to 1. Yet it is noteworthy that the criteria that disqualified Catholic Charities in California from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSteinfels on government and religion - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/steinfels_on_government_and_religion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Steinfels on government and religion - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here In other words, did the Legislature’s criteria for deciding what activities or institutions deserve a religious exemption constitute a state intrusion into religious matters that was prohibited by the First Amendment? The California court ruled no, by 6 to 1. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}