Catholic Ramblings

From Rob over at Mirror of Justice:

Assume that the Ku Klux Klan opens a homeless shelter.  The shelter is open to all races.  Hiring is also open to all races, but prospective employees must affirm their belief in the racial superiority of whites. After two years of operation, there have been no complaints from shelter residents, who are not aware that the shelter is operated by the Klan.  (The Klan operates the shelter under another name to avoid controversy.)  Outside experts confirm that the shelter is serving the public well. 

For those who believe (as I do) that a religious organization should be able to hire employees who share the beliefs underlying the organization’s mission without jeopardizing the organization’s public funding, here’s the question: should the Klan, with its racist-only hiring requirements, be eligible for public funding?

I’ve taken this to mean that Rob is employing a “law prof” analogy rather than classifying the Klan as a religious organization. With that in mind, on the narrow question of way this analogy is posed, I would not have a problem with the Klan using the funds in the way Rob has delineated, with the restrictions and caveats Rob has in place. The Klan is simply acting as a “flow-through” for the funds. Why should the personal beliefs of either the organization or the individuals involved get in the way?

With that said, the question of fungibility seems as applicable here as in any situation where government funding goes to a group which cannot use such funding towards religious expansionism. Let me propose three questions which could be asked in such situations to provide a vague framework of analysis:

1. Did the group’s effort involving the funds (homeless shelter, food bank, etc.) exist prior to the government fund availability? If it did:
2. Has the group expanded their outreach in some measurable way using the government funds?; or
3. Has the group instead directed funds that normally supported the outreach into some other, impermissible, source, essentially replacing their own funding with the government’s while using their own funding towards other ends?

In Rob’s Klan hypothetical, suppose the Klan had no program in place, but used government funds to start the program. I think that would clearly be a legitimate used of government funds. If it was already in place, and served 500 people, and the Klan expanded using government funding to serve 5,000, then the use of public funds would be legitimate. If the Klan simply replaced their own fund-raising efforts with the government funds, then there might be some question of legitimacy, especially if fund-raising for other, less permissible, efforts replaced it. If the Klan replaced their own fundraising with the government funds and redirected the funding to publishing literature promoting white supremacy, then they are clearly in illegitimate territory.

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