Many Facets to Separation of Church and State ( Birth Control and Public Schools )

I am up early this morning and catching the twitter traffic on the Morning Joe show that has Joe Scarborough .

Because it is on MSNBC it has quite a liberal audience. This morning the subject was the Catholic Church and the Birth Control mandate and they are in outrage mode over his comments ( he thinks there is a problem).

One common response is if the Catholic Church wants to avoid these problems just quit accepting Federal Funds. Of course problem number one is that does not magically do anything as to the issue at hand.

But it also shows a particular view toward the First Amendment ,and separation of Church and State ". That is if the Federal Govt provides a few bucks well it just trumps the First amendment ,and related policy concerns.

I am not sure such all crucial freedom and liberties are done away so easy by Federal investment of dollars , and I think the Court cases would back me up. Let's face it that road could very easily lead to a State funding of a State Religion versus other Faiths.

Which leads to another way Separation of Church of State is viewed or in this case not viewed. See That missing church-state angle in NYC via Get Religion.

This deal with the very controversial choice to kick out all the Faith Communities that have been having services in Public Schools . As Get Religion points out the separation of Church and State people are just portrayed as being on one side strangely.

In other words that whole “equal access” and viewpoint discrimination viewpoint of the violation of separation of Church and State argument is missing.

In a way this is similar to the "Lets Tax the Church" crowd that if the Church says boo in the public square they tax it.

The problem here is sort "viewpoint related" of course too. That is they fail to recognize that by "taxing the Church" the Church would argue well what about all these other non profits.

As to the New York case I am not enough in the weeds of that to say who I think has a better arguments on the fact. But I do know enough that there is a 1st amendment issue there that goes beyond religious folks doing religious things on public policy.