DEMOCRATS FEAR BUSH AND RELIGION

AL Gore got trounced last year among churchgoing Americans, and
Congressional Democrats seem bent on keeping the trend going by throttling
President Bush's faith-based initiative.

Gore tried to improve his party's image among the faithful by picking Sen.
Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., an openly devout Jew, as his running mate and by
endorsing the concept of federal funding for religious groups to help solve
social problems.

The Clinton administration had also advanced the concept, expanding funds
and authority for faith-based groups to work on welfare reform, mental
health and anti-drug programs.

However, now that President Bush is encouraging large-scale involvement in
social programs by religiously affiliated groups, an initiative called
``charitable choice,'' most top Democrats can find nothing good to say
about it.

Last week, for instance, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., opened his tenure as
chairman of the Judiciary Committee by declaring he had ``grave concerns
about where charitable choice may lead us.''

He cited every possible argument against the initiative, liberal and
conservative, and made it evident that he'll kill it if he can. He seems to
be speaking for most Democrats.

Even Lieberman, who has argued for the expansion of religion in American
life and has supported or co-sponsored every past charitable choice-like
initiative, now says Bush has failed to answer ``hard questions'' about the
plan's constitutionality.

Lieberman said he thinks there are ways around the problems and that he
wants to solve them, but his staff predicts that charitable choice is a
goner in the now Democrat-dominated Senate.

The plan will pass the House this summer, so it has a chance to survive in
a House-Senate conference. But then it will be up to Lieberman to convince
his Democratic colleagues to accept a compromise measure.

It's hard to tell whether Democratic hostility is a case of rampant
partisanship or rampant secularism -- almost religio-phobia.

Perhaps it's both.

Democrats were OK with Clinton and Gore allowing church-based charities to
participate in social welfare programs.

Suddenly, though, when Bush tries it, Democrats raise the specter that the
constitutional stricture against an established religion is in jeopardy,
and there's a danger that Hare Krishnas will dominate the drug-treatment field.

Leahy cited two cases in Texas in which faith-based programs had mistreated
children. He neglected to mention the countless cases of documented abuse
by state-run child welfare agencies, foster care systems and correctional
centers all over the country.

Moreover, Democrats have a deeper problem. They are aligned intellectually
and politically with liberal groups harboring a deep fear of religion, for
whom the prime characteristics of faith are prejudice, exclusionism,
judgmentalism and theocracy.

The idea that religion inherently represents love, healing, generosity and
liberation is something many Democratic politicians seem reluctant to
acknowledge.

To the extent Democrats appreciate religious values, they tend to consider
them something to be kept private and secret rather than the inspiration of
America's founders, which they were.

The framers of the Constitution wrote the First Amendment clause forbidding
the establishment of a religion in order to foster the free expression of
religion, not to suppress it.

In the debate over faith-based initiatives, there are some legitimate
questions that need to be answered and language written into law to protect
against abuse. But it can be done, and Democrats should try to find a way
to do it.

Lieberman, for instance, is concerned about a provision in House
legislation on faith-based programs that would expand the proviso that
religious groups participating in social programs can favor members of
their own sects in hiring. Allowing such groups to require that employees
follow the teachings or tenets or religious practices of the faith could
lead to the exclusion of gays and lesbians, for example.

HE is also concerned about religious proselytizing by groups receiving
federal money. And he questioned whether all religious groups --
Scientologists, Hare Krishnas, etc. -- should be eligible to participate.

John DiIulio, head of Bush's faith-based initiative, says that under
existing programs, religious groups form separate, non-religious entities
to do social welfare.

Another option is government vouchers that citizens could take to religious
or secular agencies as they wished -- the way students take their Pell
grants to secular or religious colleges of their choice.

Both traditional religious groups and marginal sects, DiIulio says, should
be judged on the basis of whether they can perform social services well,
just as non-religious welfare providers are evaluated.

Lieberman asked a good question in a recent speech: Does society have more
to fear from a rehabilitated drug addict who got clean through an
explicitly religion-based treatment program, or from an untreated,
unrehabilitated addict? It's a question he should pose to his colleagues.

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol
Hill. He wrote this for the Newspaper Enterprise Association.