It is different to escape the conclusion that one major purpose of most of the daycare bills pending in Congress is to prevent all preschool children from being subject to any religious influence. Any federal legislation that would give grants for daycare would have that effect, and there is no way to “fix” the religion daycare problem so long as grants of federal money are involved.
The original Dodd ABC daycare bill last year in Sections 20 and 21 contained some of the most virulently anti-religious language ever seen in any proposed legislation. The bill’s advocates softened some of the language this year, but they did not diminish the problem at all.
The problem is explained in a 12-page Department of Justice opinion dated May 4, 1989 which concludes that the ABC bill would impose on all religious daycare “clear litigation risks” and “oppressive government oversight.” If a church ever receives any benefit from the bill, it would suffer “far-reaching, officious government intervention in the private affairs of churches,” and if it rejects all benefits, the religious daycare facility will be regulated anyway.
Translated into laymen’s usage, this means, “Little church offering daycare, beware! If the daycare bill passes, your church will be inspected, regulated and harassed regardless of whether or not you get any benefits.”
While the Justice Department’s opinion was addressed specifically to the Dodd ABC bill, all the other pending bills that would give any “grants” or “certificates” for daycare would have the same effect. There is just no way out of the religious daycare dilemma.
Church-run daycare would most likely be barred from all benefits under the bills because, if the facility does anything at all religious (such as saying grace before milk and cookies), it would be deemed “pervasively sectarian” by the bureaucracy and the courts. Even if the church-based daycare were not ruled “pervasively sectarian,” it probably would be barred from participation because the courts would hold that the continual monitoring of the center would result in an unacceptable church-state “entanglement.”
Even if the church-based daycare sanitized itself of everything religious (i.e., prohibited Bible stories and grace before meals, covered up the cross on the wall, and stopped hiring caretakers of its own denomination) and accepted government monitoring to assure that it remained scrupulously secular, the acceptance of one dollar of federal money under any form (including “certificates”) would make the daycare facility AND its affiliated church or synagogue subject to the Civil Right Restoration Act (the Grove City Act). This would bring the church under the full force of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 309 of the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Even more significant, regardless of how faithfully the church-based daycare center purged itself of everything religious, the Justice Department predicts that these centers “would probably be the targets of endless litigation in which their policies and practices would be questioned and second guessed.” In defending themselves against such suits, church daycare would be forced to produce personnel records, expense records, and memoranda on private conversations between daycare personnel and church officials.
No wonder the Justice Department concluded that “whatever benefits religiously affiliated child care providers might receive could well be far outweighed by the financial costs and administrative burdens of compliance.” But that’s still not the worst of it.
Many states (especially in the south) now exempt church-operated daycare from state regulation and licensure, under the theory that religious daycare is a kind of Sunday school on weekdays. The Dodd ABC bill, however, would require state governments to impose all licensing and regulatory requirements (including registration requirements) “uniformly on all child care providers.”
So religious daycare which is now exempt from licensing would be ferreted out and forced into the government’s regulatory scheme. Since religious daycare predominantly serves the poor in urban areas, the net result of these bills would be to reduce services and raise costs for those least able to afford them, as well as massively discriminate against those who choose to have some religious influences on their preschool children.
There is only one approach to the child care problem that avoids all these issues: Don’t give any federal “grants” or “certificates”; instead give every preschool child a tax credit on his parents’ income tax so that parents can spend their own money in their sole discretion just like an income tax refund.
Then parents will be able to choose religious or secular, family or institutional child care, as they wish.
