Just...no.

From NPR:

A key part of the $2 trillion economic relief legislation enacted last month includes about $350 billion for the Small Business Administration (SBA) to extend loans to small businesses facing financial difficulties as a result of the coronavirus shutdown orders. Churches and other faith-based organizations are among the businesses that qualify for aid under the program, even if they have an exclusively religious orientation.

"Faith-based organizations are eligible to receive SBA loans regardless of whether they provide secular social services," the SBA said in a statement. "No otherwise eligible organization will be disqualified from receiving a loan because of the religious nature, religious identity, or religious speech of the organization.”...

The SBA statement on the participation of faith-based organizations in the new loan program declares that some agency regulations "impermissibly exclude some religious entities. Because those regulations bar the participation of a class of potential recipients based solely on their religious status, SBA will decline to enforce those subsections and will propose amendments to conform those regulations to the Constitution.”



And thus does socialism come to the pulpit. Karl Marx must be at 78 rpm by now.



Of course, this is unconstitutional, even if the Supreme Court’s Papist majority has taken a conspicuous dive on the question ever since this administration* took over. But this is the direct funding of religion with money taxed from the rest of us, some of whom may not believe in anybody’s god.

Moreover, it was on this issue precisely that James Madison wrote his brilliant "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," an argument that framed both the First Amendment and the passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom. In the Memorial and Remonstrance, Madison was arguing against a tax levied on all Virginians for the support of the Anglican church. He was unsparing in his reasons for doing so.



Because experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect, point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy. Propose a restoration of this primitive State in which its Teachers depended on the voluntary rewards of their flocks, many of them predict its downfall. On which Side ought their testimony to have greatest weight, when for or when against their interest?



I have no doubt that the fine hand of Mike Pence is involved in this raid on the public treasury. It’s yet another instance in which the administration* and its enablers are using the current crisis to achieve policy goals to which they’ve aspired for decades. Sheep’s clothing, ravenous wolves, as Scripture warns us.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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