The Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) has sent a letter asking Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) to strip Charitable Choice from the SAMHSA law that governs federal funding of substance abuse prevention and treatment services.

Kennedy has already proposed to add to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) law a universal ban on religious hiring that would also weaken the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

CARD says that is not enough damage to religious freedom. All of Charitable Choice has to be stripped out of the law, where it was put, deliberately, twice!, by Congress and President Clinton. And they justify this demand by claiming that the recommendations of the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships show that even Charitable Choice’s defenders now see that it was a mistaken idea.

Except that those recommendations don’t contradict Charitable Choice. True, the Council recommended that federal programs should state that government grants and contracts cannot be used to pay for “explicitly religious activities”—but that phrase is only an attempt to clarify a restriction that has always been part of Charitable Choice. The Council said the government should make it clear that in those grant- and contract-funded programs a beneficiary need not take part in any way in those religious activities, and should ensure that beneficiaries get written notice of their religious freedom rights. This again is but a clarification of Charitable Choice itself. And, in fact, the SAMHSA Charitable Choice regulations both specify that all religious participation has to be voluntary and that the service provider must give to beneficiaries written notice of their rights—the regulations even include model language for such a notice!

The Council also recommended that in every federal program, each beneficiary should be guaranteed access to an alternative provider if she or he objects to getting services from a faith-based provider—but that right to an alternative provider was first put into federal law by Charitable Choice itself, and the language the Council adopted is actually taken from the SAMHSA Charitable Choice rules!

The CARD authors should have read both the Council’s recommendations and the Charitable Choice laws and regulations more carefully before rushing their letter to Rep. Kennedy.