Following on the heels of the 1996 law, Congress added charitable choice provisions
to other pieces of legislation—the Community Services Block Grant Act (1998) and the
Public Health Service Act (2000). In 2001, with both Congress and the President
apparently favorably predisposed to these sorts of provisions, Representative J.C. Watts
(R
- Oklahoma) introduced the Community Solutions Act (H.R. 7), whose three sections
not only expanded the range of programs to which charitable choice could be applied but
also offered increased incentives for charitable giving and created “individual
development accounts” to encourage saving among the poor.
After the Act narrowly passed the House, it ran into a roadblock in the Democrat-
controlled Senate. Perhaps because of the President’s focus on the government’s
partnership with faith-based organizations—which, in the words of Congressman Mark
Souder (R-IN), “brought…scrutiny on every program in the country”
17
—charitable
choice was suddenly controversial, regarded by some as an “historic assault on our
nations [sic] civil rights laws.”
18
While there was and is a genuine debate concerning the
appropriate balance between governmental and non-governmental solutions to America’s
social ills, many of the principal points of controversy in this case turned on First
Amendment and other constitutional issues. When does governmental support for the
charitable activities of a faith-based organization become establishment of religion? And
when does governmental solicitude for the freedom of these organizations to maintain
their religious identity amount to support for or acquiescence in discrimination on the
basis of religion or sexual orientation?
Convention