Scum and foam were piled so high on the surface of streams and ponds in the rural Illinois area neighboring the Inwood Dairy that it looked like snow. According to Karen Hudson, a local family farmer and activist with FARM (Families Against Rural Messes), “The air pollution was so severe the neighbors were forced to tear their carpet out, and burn candles to keep the stench at bay–at night they had to spray perfume in their bedrooms…. The odor was not merely a manure odor,” Hudson added. “It had a septic and the decaying smell of a dead body. It could be smelled several miles away–I know because I live 4.5 miles from it. That is why we renamed our state from Illinois, Land of Lincoln, to Illinois, Land of Stinkin’.”

Despite an aversion to flying, Karen Hudson rounded up two colleagues from FARM, and convinced a friend to fly his small aircraft over the lagoon they had reason to believe was overflowing with animal waste emanating from the dairy. FARM invited several local news crews aboard subsequent flights, and documented what Hudson now calls the “Big Spill.” The deliberate manure release of the dairy caused “enormous damage to our community,” Hudson said.

The photos and videotape taken by FARM and reporters aired on a number of local television stations, and FARM’s photos were later used by the Illinois Attorney General’s office. “All the things we warned about regarding this corporate dairy came to light,” Hudson told me via several e-mail exchanges.

A year after the flyovers, FARM’s action paid off–well, sort of. In early May, the Peoria Journal Star reported that the Inwood Dairy agreed to pay a $50,000 fine “under an agreement between the dairy and the state’s Attorney General, who sued it when a seven-acre lagoon containing an estimated 40 million gallons of livestock waste nearly overflowed last year.” Since Inwood was ordered to drain, clean up and refill the lagoon, neighbors report that the smell has improved.

However, Hudson worries that the fine will not stop the factory and hundreds of other similar operations from haphazardly dumping their waste when no one is watching. Inwood Dairy is just one CAFO–as concentrated animal feeding operations are called–that “uses agricultural land as a septic system, or an open sewer, to dispose of the waste that’s produced in massive quantities daily,” Hudson said. It is sometimes less costly for companies to pay the fine than to clean up their mess, she pointed out.

If the corporate owners of factory farms like the Inwood Dairy have their way, Hudson’s next flyover could land her in jail. In April, the Illinois House passed House Bill 5793, by a 118-to-0 vote, making it illegal to photograph or videotape the animals at a factory farm.

The legislation, which is currently stalled in the State Senate, “makes it a crime to be on a farm (or other ‘animal facility’) and photograph or videotape pigs or any other animals without the consent of the owner if one’s intent is to ‘damage the enterprise,'” reports the Chicago Tribune. The bill defines “animal facilities” as “anywhere an animal is ‘kept, housed, handled, exhibited, bred, raised, or offered for sale or purchase.’ ” The Peoria Journal Star, arguing against the need for such a bill, observed that it “would prohibit state inspectors from taking pictures to document their investigations of these farms.”

Corporate attacks on family farm activists have increased since the Seattle anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations. Shortly after Seattle, the Des Moines-based Truth About Trade and Technology (TATT) set about tracking organizations participating in the fair trade movement. Two years ago, TATT published Who Props Up the Protesters, a 331-page report focusing on the history, goals, financial strength and level of activism of a number of groups active in the fair trade movement. Among them was the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE) Factory Farm Project (http://www.factoryfarm.org), one of a number of groups listed by TATT that actively support family farming.

Since September 11, some industry spokespersons have taken to insinuating that anticorporate activists have something in common with the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. Jimmy Neuhoff, president of the North Carolina Pork Council and owner of a large pork-producing farm, complained that family farm activists were unfairly targeting the pork industry.

In a letter to Pork Council members, published in the Winter 2002 issue of the NC Pork Report, Neuhoff wrote that, like the victims of 9/11, “the pork industry is also under attack…. [Through] a well coordinated propaganda campaign [that] began to change the public perception of agriculture, in particular pork production….

“While I am not suggesting activists are terrorists, it is interesting to note the parallels in their methods of operation. Both groups distort the truth to further their agendas. Both groups have no regard for the damage levied on innocent victims,” Neuhoff wrote.

“Corporate lobbyists and the spokesperson from the Illinois Farm Bureau contended from the start that we were exaggerating about the problems at Inwood,” Hudson pointed out. The spokesman “has been unusually silent since the disaster. We do hear that he is currently lobbying for another new megadairy that will use a twenty-six-acre lagoon and house approximately 7,000 dairy cattle. That operator allegedly has violations in Wisconsin and was cited in California for selling products with too much antibiotic residue.”

This may be another job for the FARM air corps!

Although former Vice President Quayle’s legacy may not be one for the history books, he will certainly be remembered for the day he took on television’s Murphy Brown. Some conservatives claim that it was a turning point in the war to save the family.

On May 9, the tenth anniversary of Quayle’s speech condemning Murphy Brown, he celebrated with an appearance at the National Press Club, where he delivered an address titled “Ten Years after Murphy Brown: A Mother’s Day Progress Report on the American Family.”

Ten years ago, the reaction to Quayle’s speech fell along predictable lines-liberals denounced it as another in a series of gratuitous election-year attacks on Hollywood. Conservatives were thrilled that Quayle had brought the issue of single-parent families to public attention.

Quayle’s speech was one of the first volleys in the “marriage wars.” Over the past ten years, a “marriage movement” has evolved; no longer the subject of widespread liberal disdain, marriage advocates dominated the 1996 welfare reform debate and are now key players in the debate over welfare reauthorization.

President Bush’s $300 million initiative to promote heterosexual marriage is at the heart of his welfare reauthorization proposal, and it owes its existence, in large measure, to the marriage warriors at right-wing think tanks and foundations.

Remaking the Cultural Consensus

In an early May Village Voice article, Sharon Lerner writes: “With $300 million of funds from the soon-to-be reauthorized Welfare Reform Act allotted for marriage promotion, poor people can expect an unprecedented array of programs nudging them toward the altar, including billboards advertising the joys of matrimony; ‘marriage education’ for unwed, expecting parents; and ‘marriage mentoring’ programs in which married couples serve as role models for singles.”

How has the right’s “marriage movement” become so prominent in the welfare reauthorization debate? Right-wing foundations conceptualized, supported, sustained and helped direct the debate over marriage during the past ten years, publicizing their views through Op-Ed pieces, articles, books, radio and television interviews, speaking engagements and reports rolling off the presses of conservative think tanks. David Popenoe, a seasoned veteran of the movement, discusses the pivotal role of conservative foundations in an article titled “New Day Dawning? In the Struggle Over the Family, Foundations Made the Difference,” in the March/April 2002 issue of Philanthropy magazine–the bimonthly publication of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a consortium of conservative foundations.

Popenoe is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University and co-director, along with Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, of the National Marriage Project. Popenoe explains how most foundations traditionally focused on funding “direct service programs” rather than research and public education, especially when it comes to children’s issues. However, beginning in the late 1980s several conservative foundations “blazed a new trail and supported research and public education in the child-related area of marriage and the family.”

This reorientation, led by such conservative foundations as Achelis and Bodman, Bradley, Donner, JM, Randolph and Allegheny, led policy-makers toward new ways of thinking about welfare, family and marriage issues.

The foundations set out to build a new political consensus about poverty. Popenoe says that the old consensus was framed by “the mainstream media and most of the academic community [which] fell back on the old standbys: persistent and institutional racism, income inequality, and lack of government support.” In the mid-1980s–the height of the Reagan years–instead of looking to the old formulas for understanding poverty, conservatives began examining “the serious weakening of America’s family structure” that had been taking place during those years.

Popenoe: “The divorce rate had more than doubled between 1960 and 1985, and the out-of-wedlock birthrate had quadrupled. Broken homes had grown like wildfire; doleful news articles about ‘latchkey kids’ popped up on TV and in the papers. These trends were most pronounced among blacks, but family structure rather than race accounted for the difference.”

By the late 1980s, “a small but impassioned band of academics and intellectuals concerned about the decline of the family and its devastating consequences on children made personal visits and appeals to a few innovative foundations. There, we found creative thinkers with receptive ears. The battle over changing the cultural debate–what came to be called ‘the war over the family’–was joined.”

From Murphy Brown to Welfare Queens

After his wife, Marilyn, read a Washington Post Mother’s Day piece by Whitehead about the “unwed TV mother” Murphy Brown and passed it on to her husband’s speechwriters, Quayle unloaded his guns at what Popenoe characterizes as “the TV show’s casual attitude toward fatherless childrearing.” According to Popenoe, Quayle’s speech “was the first time that the nation as a whole would seriously discuss issues like the dramatic rise of unwed births and single parenthood. For the most part, Murphy Brown’s behavior was firmly defended by the media–partly, of course, because her nemesis was the conservative Dan Quayle.”

By April 1993 Whitehead had an influential cover story in the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” While Quayle and Whitehead were bringing the fatherhood pot to a boil, the issue found “institutional advocates,” as Popenoe wrote, with the 1992 founding of the Council on Families in America, under the aegis of the New York-based Institute for American Values. Major funders of the institute include the Lilly Endowment and the Achelis and Bodman, Bradley and Earhart foundations. “Here,” writes Popenoe, “for the first time was a group of like-minded scholars and leading intellectuals who could speak with one voice and receive media attention.” Major players included Judith Wallerstein, Don Browning–who later, with the help of the Lilly Endowment, was to develop the influential Religion, Culture, and the Family Project at the University of Chicago–and Leon Kass, another University of Chicago professor who now heads the President’s Council on Bioethics. The Council on Families in America also included several liberals, among them Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the National Parenting Association; William Galston, a domestic affairs adviser to President Clinton; and “Miss Manners” Judith Martin.

Its 1995 report “Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation” found that divorce had “created terrible hardships for children, incurred unsupportable social costs, and failed to deliver on its promises of greater adult happiness. The time has come to shift the focus of national attention from divorce to marriage and to rebuild a family culture based on enduring marital relationships…. We must reclaim the ideal of marital permanence and recognize that out-of-wedlock childbearing does harm.”

Concerned foundations were building a “social movement” as the council’s ideas quickly moved into the public debate. President Clinton’s State of the Union address in 1996 was in large part devoted to family issues, and one of its primary architects was William Galston. By the end of the year, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act–otherwise known as welfare reform.

Since 1996 several states have incorporated marriage-boosting programs into their welfare programs. According to the Voice‘s Lerner, “Florida has instituted a mandatory marriage and relationship class for high school seniors. Utah[has] designated an annual ‘marriage week,’…earmark[ing] $600,000 for pro-wedlock projects, including a video. And Oklahoma’s program (which is being called ‘the Governor and Mrs. Keating’s marriage initiative’) has used $10 million of welfare money to fund rallies and a year-long tour of public appearances by a husband-and-wife team of evangelical Christian ‘marriage ambassadors.'”

Whether marriage-promotion programs can provide the support necessary to keep struggling families together is certainly debatable. And how the President’s $300 million marriage initiative will play out during the welfare reauthorization debate is unclear. But there is no doubt that the right-wing mullahs of marriage are determined to convince the nation that welfare recipients can achieve and sustain self-sufficiency only if they get married and stay married.

Popenoe is particularly proud of the fact that there has been “dramatic evidence of a turnaround in journalistic attitudes,” exemplified by an August 2001 article in the New York Times titled “2-Parent Families Rise after Change in Welfare Laws,” which criticized single-parent families and suggested that marriage can dramatically reduce poverty.

According to Popenoe, “courageous” conservative foundations encouraged the creation of new marriage-focused organizations and contributed to research centers at existing right-wing think tanks. New policy initiatives developed into legislation; the media changed its tune. The “marriage movement” had completed its circle of influence. President Bush’s current marriage initiative is not an aberration; it is the natural extension of this work.

Rudolph the Red-Handed Terrorist

After nearly four years on the run, Eric Robert Rudolph may be getting some breathing room from law enforcement officials. According to a recent CNN report, the FBI is “scaling back its search” for the suspected 1996 Olympics bomber after spending more than $30 million in the hunt for the missing fugitive.

Rudolph, who some speculate has disappeared into the wilds of the mountains of North Carolina, has been charged with placing in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Olympic Games a bomb that killed one person and injured more than 100. He is also suspected of the double bombing at the Otherside Lounge, a gay and lesbian bar, in Atlanta on February 21, 1997.

Since May 1998, Rudolph has been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List.

He was remembered recently in two letters received by a shoe store in Andrews, North Carolina and by the Andrews Journal newspaper–purportedly sent by the Army of God. According to an Associated Press report, “The typed letters were topped with the words ‘Eric Robert Rudolph’ and ‘May God be with you,’ ” and they vowed to use “lethal force” to stop abortions.

The letters said: “We the remnant of the god-fearing men and women of the United States of Amerika [sic] do officially declare war on the entire child killing industry.” Because “all of the options have expired, we are forced to take arms against you. Our life for yours–a simple equation. Dreadful. Sad. Reality, nonetheless. You shall not be tortured at our hands. Vengeance belongs to God only. However, execution is rarely gentle.”

The Army of God has had a higher profile of late. Shortly after the New Year’s Day beheading of three homosexuals in Saudi Arabia, the Rev. Michael Bray, the so-called chaplain of the Army of God, praised the executions. In an article posted at his website, Bray writes: “While the Christians among us westerners would decline to emulate our Muslim friends in many ways…we can appreciate the justice they advocate regarding sodomy. Might these fellows also consider an embryonic jihad? Let us welcome these tools of purification. Open the borders! Bring in some agents of cleansing. We have no standards of citizenship. Perhaps the issue can be forced and we can get some discussion going.”

Bray, author of A Time to Kill and co-host of the annual antiabortion terrorist-fest known as the White Rose Banquet, also praised the actions of antiabortion terrorist Clayton Lee Waagner. After escaping from an Illinois jail, Waagner spent ten months on the lam. Before he was captured in early December, he admitted to sending letters claiming to contain anthrax to hundreds of abortion clinics. “The use of anthrax or the threat of the same is not popular,” Reverend Bray said, “especially in the wake of 911. But it was certainly effectual. Abortuaries were closed all around the country. Babies were, by all facts of statistics, saved from death.”

While on the run, Waagner told Neal Horsley, the creator of the infamous Nuremberg Files website, that he had put together a list of forty-two abortion workers he was prepared to kill.

On Friday, January 25, in an Urbana, Illinois, courtroom, Waagner was sentenced to thirty years and four months for weapons, theft and escape convictions. Despite the severe sentence, some unfinished business remains–more charges are expected and additional legal proceedings await him. Questions about his “hit list” are still to be answered. Ann Glazier, director of security for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told me that while Waagner’s claim of a hit list has not been confirmed, “it is known that he had been doing surveillance and had enough information on abortion workers so that he could find them and kill them. He never was more specific about who might be on such a list.” Because the investigation is ongoing, Glazier said, “we have not gotten any specific names, or seen a specific list nor has law enforcement called us about any particular person.”

Glazier also pointed out that law enforcement officials confiscated two of Waagner’s computers, and she was hopeful that “more information would come out during any future legal proceedings.” At this point, it’s anybody’s guess whether Waagner’s list ever existed–on paper or in his computer–or whether it was a product of his fevered antiabortion imagination.

Waiting for Kopp

James Charles Kopp, the antiabortion activist indicted for the October 23, 1998, murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, a Buffalo, New York, abortion provider, might be extradited by France to the United States within the next few months. In June 2001, a French court recommended Kopp’s extradition only if the US agreed not to pursue the death penalty. Attorney General John Ashcroft agreed to that, saying, “The priority must be Kopp’s return,” according to USA Today. Kopp had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and was captured in March 2001 by French officials, after US authorities traced him there.

Two of Kopp’s alleged supporters, Loretta Marra, 38, and her husband, Dennis Malvasi, 52, are due in court in late July, accused of “sending Kopp money and information to help him remain a fugitive for more than two years,” according to the Associated Press. AP’s early April report also pointed out that “Malvasi has two previous convictions for abortion clinic bombings, and Marra had been arrested with Kopp at abortion protests in Vermont and Italy.”

Shaking the Nation

Launched on September 5 but suspended because of 9/11, phase two of the “Shake the Nation Back to Life” campaign was unveiled at a mid-January press conference in Washington, DC, by campaign coordinator Janet Folger. Folger, national director of Dr. D. James Kennedy’s Center for Reclaiming America, was joined on the platform by a who’s who of the antiabortion glitterati–including Gary Bauer, president of American Values; Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council (FRC); Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women for America (CWA); Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition; Allan Parker, president of the Texas Justice Foundation and Operation Outcry; and Shannon Royce, legislative counsel and director of government relations of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The “Shake the Nation” crusade involves several dozen antiabortion groups funding high-profile television advertisements. Thousands of baby rattles will also be delivered to US senators. (By Folger’s count, supporters have already purchased 40,000 rattles.) According to the campaign website, phase two showcases an ad featuring “three prominent figures in the legalization of abortion on demand: Norma McCorvey, the ‘Roe’ of Roe v. Wade; Sandra Cano, the ‘Doe’ of Doe v. Bolton; and Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). All three are now pro-life and boldly declare in the television ad the truth–that ‘abortion is a lie.’ ” (For more on this, see www.shakethenation.org.)

The Heat’s on in Texas

Operation Save America (OSA), one of the country’s most volatile antiabortion groups, is hoping to raise the temperature in Dallas this summer. According to OSA’s website, Dallas is being targeted because that is where Roe v. Wade began. The website claims “it was in the summer of 1969 that a troubled and pregnant young lady by the name of Norma McCorvey met with attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee in a pizza parlor off Greenville Avenue in Dallas. These two street wise and publicity hungry attorneys used Miss McCorvey and her pregnancy to perpetrate one of the most heinous crimes in our nation’s history.”

OSA is asking supporters to come to Dallas, July 13-21, to attend to “unfinished business.” There will be “street activities every day”; “rallies every night”; teaching seminars and speeches by longtime antiabortion activists Flip Benham, formerly of Operation Rescue and now director of OSA; Father Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life; and Judie Brown, president and founder of the American Life League. (For more from OSA see www.operationsaveamerica.org/streets/dallas02/index2.htm.)

Simon: Changing the Subject

Immediately after Bill Simon–the son of Nixon’s late Treasury Secretary and right-wing philanthropist William Simon–won his surprising come-from-behind victory in the [STATE] Republican gubernatorial primary on March 5, he pledged to “change the subject” if asked about controversial social issues like abortion.

Kate Michelman, the head of NARAL, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, doesn’t intend to allow him that luxury. In late March she told the San Francisco Chronicle that Simon “doesn’t represent the interests of women on the issue of reproductive rights.” While Simon’s campaign manager Sal Russo tried to stay on message with comments about the economy and education, Harriet Stinson, the founder of Republicans for Choice, told the Chronicle: “California women deserve to know where Simon stands on reproductive rights issues. These issues matter tremendously. We want no surprises from him.”

With compromise legislation stranded in Congress, the report card on the President’s faith-based initiative reads “incomplete.” Bush, however, has clearly succeeded on two fronts. He’s made terms like “faith-based” and “armies of compassion” part of the national vocabulary. And with faith-based liaison offices in five Cabinet departments-Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Education and Labor-he has injected seasoned veterans of the conservative movement and the religious right into important policy-making positions. Led by longtime “charitable choice” supporters HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and Attorney General John Ashcroft, Team Bush is building its own “army” of Christian soldiers.

President Bush has invoked “faith-based organizations” as a solution to solving social problems numerous times since September 11. During his State of the Union address he pitched the USA Freedom Corps initiative and tied its success to the participation of faith-based organizations. Faith-based groups are at the core of his welfare reauthorization package. And the President’s drug war initiative depends on the unleashing of the “armies of compassion” with “compassionate coercion”-the latest twist on Marvin Olasky’s “compassionate conservatism.”

Fourteen months ago, surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders, President Bush issued the executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI). But the initiative’s first year was hardly triumphant as it met unanticipated opposition from the right along with predictable opposition from the left, and suffered from a dose of internal discord.

Progressives were concerned that the initiative blurred the line between church and state, while Christian conservatives, including the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were mortified that groups like the Nation of Islam, Church of Scientology and Hare Krishnas would feed off government grants. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, claimed he wouldn’t touch faith-based money “with the proverbial ten-foot pole.” He was worried that any regulatory strings might strip the initiative of its “faith.”

The President’s faith-based initiative languished in policy purgatory for a year, but in early February, Senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Connecticut’s Joseph Lieberman delivered their bipartisan legislative makeover-the Charity Aid, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Act. The “compromise” version opens up government grants to religious organizations but eliminates “charitable choice,” the most controversial aspect of the President’s faith-based initiative. (“Charitable choice” was the provision tucked into the 1996 welfare reform bill by then-Senator John Ashcroft. It allowed religious institutions to compete for government funds to provide a bevy of welfare services.)

CARE expands tax deductions for charitable donations and, according to Church & State magazine, provides about $150 million for technical assistance to smaller charities, helping facilitate their ability to apply for federal grants. It also sets aside funding for a “Compassionate Capital Fund” aimed at developing more public-private charitable partnerships. The overall price tag for the plan is estimated at about $12 billion.

Several religious right leaders were disappointed with the compromise. “We’re very upset,” Patrick Trueman, director of government affairs for the American Family Association, told the Washington Times. “The president’s faith-based initiative was the hallmark of his administration. If he caves on that, we can’t trust him on any issue of our agenda.”

And Pat Robertson, who expressed his doubts about the President’s faith-based initiative when it was announced last January, told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes that “if the government gets into the faith-based initiative too much, they’re going to dominate what the people of faith think. And one of the things they want to impose is on hiring practices. They want to force people to be hired by religious organizations who don’t share the fundamental tenets of those religious groups.”

Although the CARE Act hasn’t been scheduled for a vote in the Senate yet, it is likely to pass when it is. Then comes the task of squaring the Senate version with the already passed House version, HR 7, which contains the controversial “charitable choice” provision.

New Director Appointed, Agency De-emphasized

In early February 2002, Bush introduced Jim Towey as the new director of the White House OFBCI. A close friend of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Towey worked on Capitol Hill and as legal counsel in Mother Teresa’s ministry before becoming Florida’s health and rehabilitative services director under Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles. Although he wasn’t an immediate favorite of Florida conservatives, Towey redeemed himself by endorsing Jeb Bush in his run for governor. Towey also founded a Florida-based advocacy group called Aging with Dignity in 1996.

Towey’s appointment came more than six months after John DiIulio, citing family and health concerns, resigned as the first director of OFBCI. At the time of his resignation, conservatives were delighted: The Hudson Institute’s Michael Horowitz told the Washington Post that DiIulio had been “the most strategically disastrous appointee to a senior government position in the 20-plus years I’ve been in Washington. He has taken what could have been a triumphant issue and marched it smack into quicksand.” Horowitz’s statement is indicative of the negative feelings the appointment of DiIulio generated among conservatives.

Last summer, in a long cover piece written for World, an evangelical weekly, Marvin Olasky explained the Administration’s strategy in choosing DiIulio. It was “to show liberals that he was not in the religious right’s corner.” As far as the Administration was concerned, writes Olasky, “It would be fine if conservative Christians became irritated at Mr. DiIulio because liberal Republicans and Democrats would be far more likely to vote for measures and trust a man criticized by the people they distrusted.”

And irritated they became when, early on, DiIulio criticized Christian right leaders for not ministering directly to the poor, and when he remarked in February 2001 that “Bible-thumping doesn’t cut it.”

As for Towey’s appointment, Church & State reports that Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Bush’s choice a “tremendous appointment.” And Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, described Towey as “sensational.”

In a follow-up move to Towey’s appointment, Bush de-emphasized the OFBCI by placing the agency under the wing of John Bridgeland, newly appointed head of the USA Freedom Corps. “A year ago, this initiative was the signature domestic policy of the Bush Administration,” Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s executive director Barry Lynn noted. “After twelve months of criticism from the right, left and center, it’s been downgraded to part of an office on volunteerism. With all of these problems, it looks like Towey will have his work cut out for him.”

Faith-Based Initiatives in the States

According to a report by Mike O’Keefe of the Newhouse News Service, the President’s faith-based initiative is chugging along in the states. Five Cabinet-level agencies “are identifying and removing barriers that prevent religious groups from receiving government grants” and participating in programs dealing with providing social services. O’Keefe cites a recent Hudson Institute study of fifteen states, which found that $124 million in grants have already been delivered to 726 faith-based organizations.

According to O’Keefe, HHS “informed states in a February 26 directive that state welfare plans would have to include a strategy on how they will include faith-based organizations.” The most disturbing aspect of the directive is that HHS is “encouraging states to consider church-trained counselors, not just counselors with psychological and medical credentials, when granting federal money to fight drug and alcohol abuse.” Elizabeth Seale-Scott, director of faith-based efforts at HHS, said: “We don’t want to present the same medical model over and over as if that’s the definitive measure.”

US District Court Rules Against Faith-Based Initiative

In early January, the public funding of faith-based initiatives took a judicial hit. Judge Barbara B. Crabb, of the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, ruled that Faith Works, a residential program for male addicts, “indoctrinates its participants in religion, primarily through its counselors.”

Faith Works had received more than $900,000 from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and other government and private sources. According to the Washington Times, Judge Crabb found that the DWD funding “constitutes unrestricted, direct funding of an organization that engages in religious indoctrination” in violation of the establishment clause of the Constitution. She ordered an end to the funds.

Pew Funds Faith-Based Study

In late February, the Pew Charitable Trusts announced it had given $6.3 million to the Rockefeller Institute of Government (RIG), based at the State University of New York in Albany, to establish the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy. One of their primary tasks will be “to obtain a comprehensive, impartial body of research on…[the] complicated issues” surrounding faith-based initiatives.

Headed by RIG director Richard Nathan, the roundtable “will produce research on the capacity and effectiveness of faith-based social services, and on the important legal and constitutional issues surrounding government support of such activities.” The George Washington University Law School will join the RIG in the research, and Search for Common Ground, a Washington, DC-based conflict-resolution nonprofit, will play a “key role in the initiative’s major convening activities.”

Luis Lugo, director of Pew’s religion program, said the roundtable would address the pressing need for nonpartisan, fact-based analysis of the role of religious organizations in social welfare policy. “The reality is that we do not really know enough about faith-based social services-how effective they are when compared with secular alternatives, what they do best, or even the degree to which the faith factor is interwoven into their work–nor about the possible legal parameters of religious groups competing for federal dollars.”

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Faith-Based Involvement: The Welfare Information Network

offers far and away the most comprehensive clearinghouse of information on faith-based issues. The site provides announcements of new reports, studies and grant opportunities; an extensive list of WIN publications on welfare reform, fatherhood, “charitable choice” and other issues; federal and state-specific initiatives; technical assistance providers; and publications related to faith-based involvement. WIN links to a large number of organizations from across the political spectrum.

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Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: Rallying the Armies of Compassion

. This White House website provides government documents, the President’s speeches and news releases to rally the troops.

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“Charitable Choice”

: created by the Center for Public Justice, which claims to be “committed to public service that responds to God’s call to do justice in local, national, and international affairs.” Focuses on “charitable choice” and welfare issues, and offers links to current news stories, reports and studies.

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Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Congregations, the Government and Social Justice

: project of the Washington, DC-based center-right Brookings Institution, exploring “congregations’ proper roles…in lifting up the poor, and what their relationship to government should be.” Brookings recently published “Can an Office Change a Country? The White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, A Year in Review.”

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The Center for the Study of Compassionate Conservatism

: Worth checking out because Marvin Olasky, the godfather of “compassionate conservatism” is on its board of directors, and several of his articles are available. www.compassionateconservative.cc

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American Atheists

: follows church-state separation issues and has published important investigative reports on “faith-based” issues. Check out AA’s “FlashLine” section for breaking stories.

While most of the media focused, with good reason, on the huge increase in military spending and dramatic cuts in domestic programs in President Bush’s $2.1 trillion budget proposal for 2003, a few enterprising reporters dug deep into the budget’s core. One of the things they unearthed is a school voucher program disguised as an education tax credit.

That’s right, a school voucher program–similar to those that have been repeatedly defeated by voters across the country and the one that was removed from the President’s education bill–has resurfaced in the budget. According to the Washington Post, the President’s proposal would grant a tax credit of up to $2,500 a year to subsidize private school for children whose public schools are judged to be failing under state standards. The estimated cost of the program is $3.7 billion over five years.

The President’s budget was released a few weeks before the US Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in three cases involving the school voucher program in Cleveland, in which the Administration urged the Court to uphold vouchers. The central question before the Court is at the heart of the voucher debate: Does the use of public tax money to pay for religious schools violate the principle of the separation of church and state?

If the Supreme Court, which will render its judgment later this year, endorses the program, it will be the first major victory for voucher supporters and could open the floodgates for other states and cities to try similar programs. It would also strengthen the President’s hand as he tries to win Congressional support for a full-blown national voucher program. While a ruling against the Cleveland voucher program would be a major blow, voucher supporters now appear to have a fallback position in the President’s education tax credit.

According to the American Federation of Teachers, the measure would allow taxpayers to claim credits on their state or federal income taxes for “expenses associated with sending their children to private or religious schools.” The credits would sometimes be available for public school expenses as well, but the AFT claims that the families most likely to benefit from the program are those “who send their children to private or religious schools because their schooling expenses are higher than the educational expenses of families who send their children to public schools.” The Administration, reports the Post, contends that the money could also be used for books, computers and other equipment needed for home schooling, or for transportation to a private school or better public school.

But the AFT points out that the credits are worth more than existing tuition tax deductions, and would benefit wealthy families most. And disturbingly, the credits would “lead to a loss of state or federal tax revenue and thereby can lead to a reduction in funding for public schools or other vital public services.”

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sees the tax credit as an end run around church-state separation and has called Bush’s proposal a “back-door” voucher scheme. “It takes money from the public treasury to finance religious and other private schools. Congress should quickly reject this misguided gambit. At a time when lawmakers are struggling to maintain a balanced budget, a costly multibillion subsidy for religious schooling is an incredibly bad idea,” Lynn continued. “On this test, I’d give Bush an ‘F.'”

When the President’s education bill, sans the vouchers provision, was signed into law, many religious conservatives argued that Bush had abandoned them in his rush to embrace Senator Ted Kennedy and other liberal Democrats. It now appears to be payback time.

Tim Lamer, writing in World magazine, an evangelical weekly, points out that “while voucher programs remain political poison, tax-credit programs are quietly gaining political steam across the country.” He argues that tax credits are better than vouchers because “they restore a measure of liberty to taxpayers…. They do not threaten the independence of private schools the way vouchers do.”

The Center for Education Reform (CER), a nonprofit organization founded in 1993 to provide support to individuals and groups who are “working to bring fundamental reforms to their schools”–read, to support school vouchers, charter schools and tuition tax credits–observes that limited tuition tax credits already exist in Minnesota and Iowa. Arizona offers a tax credit for donations to privately funded voucher programs. Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin are seriously considering the idea, and it has come up in South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri and Oregon.

According to a mid-February Washington Times report, Congressional Republicans have been debating whether to back President Bush’s tuition tax credit plan or any of a number of other tax-credit initiatives floating around the House. Democrats, who generally oppose the tax credits, think it unlikely they will make it through Congress this session. But even if the proposal fails this time–and especially if voucher supporters don’t get the decision they want from the Supreme Court–education tax credits will surely arise again as a stealthy way to resuscitate vouchers.

Barbara Coe is not your typical sixty-something silver-haired-senior-in-polyester. The California resident, who claims to be part Sioux Indian, is a seasoned veteran of the state’s anti-immigrant wars. Now, in the wake of September 11, she thinks the time is ripe for another anti-immigrant campaign.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, at a rally at the Garden Grove Woman’s Civic Hall, the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) announced that they would begin collecting signatures for a new statewide anti-immigrant ballot initiative. According to the Orange County Register, Barbara Coe, president of CCIR, boasted that her new ballot initiative–eerily titled the “Homeland Security Initiative”–would deny illegal immigrants access to public services. (For more on CCIR, see www.ccir.net.)

Coe’s California initiative, which may be the tip of a nationwide anti-immigration iceberg, is being described as a “modified” version of the state’s notorious 1994 anti-immigrant ballot initiative, Proposition 187. In fact, Coe worked with then-Governor Pete Wilson to pass Prop 187, which was later ruled unconstitutional by the courts and subsequently suspended by Governor Gray Davis. According to the Orange County Register, ” ‘The Homeland Security Initiative’ is intended to remove what it calls incentives for illegal immigration. It would require the state to verify the legal status of anyone receiving ‘public benefits,’ ensure that all applicants for driver’s licenses are in the country legally, and require that police officers turn over any illegal immigrants they arrest to federal authorities.”

These days, conservatives are fond of fashioning a connection between immigration and terrorism. A good portion of Pat Buchanan’s latest book, Death of the West, is devoted to warning that immigrant hordes are hellbent on destroying Western civilization. Congressman Ron Paul, who represents the 14th Congressional District of Texas, described it this way: “The fight against terrorism should be fought largely at our borders. Once potential terrorists are in the country, the task of finding and arresting them becomes much harder, and the calls for intrusive government monitoring of all of us become louder. If we do not want to move in the direction of a police state at home, we must prevent terrorists from entering the country in the first place. Finally, meaningful immigration reform can only take place when we end the welfare state. No one has a right to immigrate to America and receive benefits paid for by taxpayers. When we eliminate welfare incentives, we insure that only those who truly seek America’s freedoms and opportunities will want to come here.”

Barbara Coe is no anti-immigration amateur. Since the mid-1990s, according to the Chicago-based Center for New Community (CNC), an organization that monitors the activities of white supremacist organizations, Coe’s California Coalition for Immigration Reform has been “the leading grassroots anti-immigrant organization in the country…with an impact that has extended beyond the borders of California to reach across the country.” CCIR has been able to “find allies in elected office even while maintaining a firm footing in the politics of white supremacy.”

For years, CCIR has been working with a number of anti-immigrant white supremacist organizations. The Orange County Register pointed out that Coe “works closely” with Glenn Spencer, leader of the Sherman Oaks-based American Patrol and Voice of Citizens Together. American Patrol and Voices of Citizens Together, along with other groups including the White Aryan Resistance, is one of more than 600 organizations on a list of “active hate groups” compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Spencer’s contribution includes the production of videos warning about a vast Mexican conspiracy to take over the Southwest.

Coe insists that her group has been falsely accused: “We know we’re not [hate groups]. We both know what we are, who we are and who we represent,” she told the Register. She also claims that her “efforts are not racially motivated or targeted at Mexican immigrants.”

In 1996, however, Coe told the Washington Times: “Are we shocked by the demands that Latinos be given instant citizenship privileges… These are the same legal and illegal immigrants who bleed our welfare and medical care programs dry for benefits that citizens are denied, destroy our educational system, and laugh at our judicial system while they grab their welfare checks with one hand, deal drugs with the other, and their gangs savagely murder our citizens.”

The Center for New Community has thoroughly documented CCIR’s activities. According to CNC, CCIR’s newsletter 9*1*1 promotes the “infamous ‘Reconquista’ conspiracy theory that permeates the anti-immigrant movement at the grassroots level.” In stories headlined “Hispanic Takeover of U.S. Predicted in 1980s” and “The ‘Immigration Invasion’ is a Reality!: Who’ll Take Over the U.S. First–Mexico or China?” (9*1*1, July 1997), CCIR outlines this racially charged conspiracy theory. Coe claims that the Mexican government promotes illegal immigration with “Reconquista” in mind. According to her, “Mexico intends to 1. Reclaim all the southwestern states for Mexico as the ‘Nation of Aztlan’; 2. Take over & control the United States government; and 3. Establish communism in the United States…”

The Center for New Community reports that CCIR has been involved in joint actions with a number of white supremacist organizations over the years. Coe and CCIR’s Stan Hess attended a December 1995 conference in Birmingham sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC); she authored a cover story with CofCC’s Earl Holt for the fall 1996 issue of the Citizens Informer which described pro-immigrant demonstrators as “cockroaches.” At a January 1998 anti-immigration demonstration in Cullman, Alabama, “Hess was arrested with Alabama anti-immigrant activists James Floyd and William Burchfield after the three burned a Mexican flag, a United Nations flag and a flag bearing a hammer and sickle,” according to the Center for New Community’s August 2001 Background Brief. One month later, 9*1*1 praised Floyd and Burchfield, dubbing them “patriots of the highest caliber who are seeing their state, Birmingham & their own home town of Cullman being destroyed by the deluge of illegal aliens who are being imported to work for the ‘cheap labor’ poultry corporations.” (The CNC’s background brief is accessible at www.newcomm.org/bdi/Backgrounders/SQL/index.htm.)

Toward the end of the post-Thanksgiving rally at the Garden Grove Woman’s Civic Hall, Harold Martin, a member of the Anaheim school board, summed up the prevailing mood of the evening. Echoing the anti-immigrant themes of Buchanan’s latest book, Martin warned that Mexican immigrants want “to overthrow our culture, our way of life.” And just to make sure people understood the message, Martin invoked the tragedy of September 11, saying that the objectives of Mexican immigrants “are no different than Osama bin Laden’s.”