any
had never met before. Some were acquainted only from shouting at one
another on television talk shows about the proper place to draw the
line between church and state.
But in a series of meetings over six months, a group of 33
prominent civil libertarians, clergy members, lawyers, theologians
and leaders of religious social service programs sat around a table
to hammer out points of agreement on the president's proposal to
expand government support to religiously based social services.
Yesterday, the group, led by former Senator Harris Wofford, a
Pennsylvania Democrat, released a report recommending steps that Mr.
Wofford said could lay the groundwork to advance the president's
proposal, which has been stalled.
The group agreed that the government should spur charitable
giving by allowing taxpayers who do not itemize their tax returns to
deduct their donations to charity. The members of the group also
agreed that religious groups that want to operate social service
programs should form separate nonprofit organizations, and that the
Internal Revenue Service should speed their applications for
tax-exempt status and waive the related fees.
The group's report also recommended that private foundations and
corporations consider dropping restrictions they might have on
giving money to religious programs.
But the group members were unable to find agreement on the sticky
issues that have mired President Bush's proposal in controversy from
the start: whether tax dollars should be used for social service
programs where religion is a fundamental element, and whether
charities that receive government financing should be allowed to
discriminate along religious lines in hiring.
"There were definitely issues on which we were too far apart to
reach consensus," Mr. Wofford said in an interview. "But if you were
running a faith-based organization or charity, and all the things we
proposed were actually implemented, it would mean a dramatic
expansion of what your organization could do."
One participant, Kevin J. Seamus Hasson, president of the Becket
Fund for Religious Liberty, a legal advocate for religious groups,
said: "The religious side of the house wanted to say in the
employment dispute, `Let us retain our institutional integrity and
hire people who are our fellow believers.' The secular side of the
house said: `This is employment discrimination, that's a bad thing,
and for the government to fund it is even worse.' We didn't solve
that controversy."
The group was convened last summer at the request of Senator Rick
Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, who with Senator Joseph I.
Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, is sponsoring legislation to
advance the president's initiative. To lead the effort, Mr. Santorum
tapped his former rival for the Pennsylvania Senate seat, Mr.
Wofford, whom Mr. Santorum defeated in 1994.
Both men shared concern that the goal of a large infusion of
assistance to programs serving the poor and needy had become
sidetracked in the debate over church-state issues.
Members of the group ranged from leaders of the American Civil
Liberties Union to religious programs led by Roman Catholics,
Baptists and African-Americans.
Their report indicates that the pieces of Mr. Bush's proposal
most likely to survive are those that stimulate private giving to
charities — not direct government financing.
"It shows that the blueprint that Senator Lieberman and I put
together is one that really has very little ideological division,"
Mr. Santorum said in an interview.
But some questioned whether the effort had produced anything
new.
"I don't think there is any huge breakthrough here," said Nathan
Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish
Congregations of America, who did not participate in the group but
has supported the president's initiative.
