January 14, 2002
Courts address faith-based funding, objections to evolution teaching
___WASHINGTON (RNS/ABP)--Government funding of faith-based programs and objections to the teaching of evolution both were dealt setbacks in the courts last week.
___In Wisconsin, a federal judge ordered the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development to halt funding of a faith-based Milwaukee program that helps troubled fathers with job training and drug treatment.
___U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb issued the order Jan. 8 after a lawsuit was filed by the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation opposing money going to the Faith Works program.
___During his presidential campaign, President Bush visited the program.
___Faith Works receives grants from the state workforce development department and has a contract with the state corrections department to run a halfway house that provides 24-hour supervised residential care.
___In her ruling, Crabb said the grants from the Department of Workforce Development were unconstitutional because they amount to "unrestricted, direct funding of an organization that engages in religious indoctrination."
___The judge ordered a trial to determine the constitutionality of the contract that Faith Works has with the state Department of Corrections.
___This will be "a major blow to President Bush's faith-based initiative," said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
___Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case that could have decided if public school teachers have a First Amendment right to contradict their school district's policy on the teaching of evolution.
___The court refused, without comment, to review a Minnesota court decision that dismissed a lawsuit by a high school science teacher.
___Rodney LeVake was removed from his position as a 10th-grade biology teacher in the southern Minnesota town of Faribault in 1998 after a colleague raised concerns about LeVake's thoroughness in teaching the theory of evolution. He then was reassigned to a lower-level science class that did not involve teaching evolution.
___LeVake had told the colleague he couldn't teach evolution in good conscience, and when the fellow teacher informed administrators, they initiated the process that ultimately led to LeVake's removal.
___LeVake also presented a "position paper" in which he noted what he believed were faults with the theory of evolution and said he merely wanted the right to teach these. LeVake said he only wanted to take "an honest look at the difficulties and inconsistencies of the theory without turning my class into a religious one."
___With the aid of the American Center for Law and Justice, LeVake sued the school district for discrimination, saying the district's actions violated his First Amendment rights to free expression of religion and free speech.
___A three-judge panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals, however, ruled unanimously that a lower court was correct in dismissing LeVake's lawsuit against the district because, in the court's opinion, LeVake did not prove a legitimate claim to discrimination.
___"It is unclear on what basis LeVake argues that his right to free exercise of religion was violated," the Minnesota judges wrote in their opinion. "LeVake does not contend that (the school district) prohibited him from practicing the religion of his choice. He does not assert that (the school district) demanded that he refrain from practicing his religion outside of the scope of his duties as a public school teacher in order to retain his teaching position, and he does not assert that the curriculum requirements incidentally infringed on his religious practice."
___In the past, the Supreme Court has declared state laws requiring teaching creationism in public schools were unconstitutional. Since that time, many advocates of creation science have embraced a less religiously specific philosophy of creation called "intelligent design" theory. The theory doesn't deny that species have evolved or that the Earth is older than a few thousand years but suggests that an "intelligent force" guided the process. LeVake used ideas from intelligent design in his proposal to teach ideas contradicting evolution.
___Wayne Holstad, LeVake's attorney, told the Supreme Court the teacher "was silenced not for anything he said in the classroom, but merely for holding a contrary viewpoint and expressing a desire to say certain things which the school district deemed out of step with its officially imposed orthodoxy."
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