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1. Jim Wallis gives Democratic weekly radio address
Accepting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's invitation "was a difficult decision," the Sojourners president wrote on his blog. "I work hard to maintain my independence and non-partisanship, and didn't want to be perceived as supporting one party over the other. But it was an occasion to get our message to millions of people, so I decided to accept."

Wallis's address, touted as the first such weekly radio address by "a non-partisan religious leader," began with a disclaimer: "I want to be clear that I am not speaking for the Democratic Party, but as a person of faith who feels the hunger in America for a new vision of our life together and sees the opportunity to apply our best moral values to the urgent problems we face. I am not an elected official or political partisan, but a religious leader who believes that real solutions must transcend partisan politics."

Wire stories on the address focused on Wallis's calls for action on corruption, Iraq, poverty, the environment, and abortion.

2. Faith-based initiative goes to the Supreme Court—in a way
Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation is a case about Bush's faith-based initiative, but, as the First Amendment Center's Tony Mauro points out, it "does not directly test the meaning of the establishment clause itself." Instead, it's a case about standing. Right now, Hein isn't about whether government-sponsored conferences for the faith-based initiative violated the First Amendment, but whether the Freedom from Religion Foundation can bring a suit accusing the conferences of doing so. Mauro explains:

Under the traditional doctrine of standing, you can't challenge a government program you don't like just because your taxes — or some infinitesimal fraction of your taxes — paid for the program.

To reduce litigation against the government for every general grievance, courts have required instead that taxpayers show they have suffered real, specific harm — or will soon — to a legally protected interest from the program they don't like, before they can challenge it in court.

But a Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago made an exception to that high standard when a taxpayer alleges that a government program violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion").

The Hein case, which the Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider, "could prompt a review, if not a narrowing, of that exception, which critics say has made it too easy to mount establishment-clause lawsuits against government efforts to accommodate religion," Mauro says. That is very important, he says, "because standing is a threshold issue in every establishment-clause case."

3. Minced oaths
So you've probably already read about Dennis Prager's complaints that Keith Ellison will use a Qur'an instead of a Bible for his ceremonial oath of office when he becomes a U.S. Representative from Minnesota. The American Family Association wants Congress to "pass a law making the Bible the book used in the swearing-in ceremonies of Representatives and Senators." Prager's colleague at Salem Radio Network, Michael Medved, has been critical of Prager's remarks. (Prager and Medved are both Jews.) And hundreds of bloggers are discussing the subject. But if you're going to hit one place, check out The Point, the blog of Prison Fellowship's BreakPoint. Travis McSherley and Roberto Rivera are at odds; the latest post suggests that in the official swearing in (rather than in ceremonial photo ops for family and supporters), no holy book is used. In other words, this story is a non-story. So who's up for debating whether taking an oath of office is itself unbiblical?

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December (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50