The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty wants to make sure a provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“ARRA,” also called the “stimulus package” passed by Congress in February) is implemented the way it is intended — to both prevent public money from going to solely religious structures and to protect individual students’ freedom of religious expression in public institutions of higher education.

  On May 12, the Baptist Joint Committee joined the American Jewish Congress in sending a letter to the Department of Education to share its concerns. The two groups want the Department to offer guidance on section §14004(c)(3)(A)(B) of the stimulus package to make sure organizations do not misinterpret the language to violate the religious freedom rights of students on college and university campuses.....

     The BJC does not take a position on the legal status of same-sex unions. The increasingly frequent and intense claims linking gay rights and religious liberty, however, require attention. Charges that one’s adversaries violate religious freedom or the separation of church and state do little to advance the debate over marriage rights. Instead, they often cause confusion about the constitutional protection of religious freedom in America.

     For the BJC, promoting religious liberty for all means protecting the rights of individuals and faith communities to believe and practice their religion as they see fit and keeping the government from advancing or inhibiting religion. It is a fundamental value that deserves and enjoys broad support. Maintaining our large Baptist coalition to preserve the Baptist legacy of defending religious freedom is challenging enough; building a consensus on religious or public policy concerns beyond our core mission would be impossible......

Let me begin this retrospective on the 19-year court tenure of Justice David Souter by returning to an earlier prognostication. In November 1990, after Justice Souter’s confirmation and on the eve of his service on the U.S. Supreme Court, I wrote the following in Report from the Capital:

Judge Souter’s position on First Amendment issues becomes critically important as this new, conservative-leaning, philosophically-statist Court moves into the 1990’s. We cannot expect Judge Souter to fill William Brennan’s strong leadership role in church-state cases, at least not immediately. However, one hopes that Judge Souter’s voting record will be as good as Brennan’s and that in time he will be able to steer the Court in the direction that will restore our ‘first liberty’ to the constitutional pre-eminence that it deserves.

     As one whose predictions are often wrong, I think I can boast some reasonable accuracy in this one about Justice Souter’s church-state record. Of course, how Justice Souter would perform on the Court was not entirely clear at the time of his nomination. His tenure as a justice on the New Hampshire Supreme Court and brief service on a Federal appeals court revealed only a meager record on church and state. However, his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing incorporated promising testimony about his understanding of the First Amendment’s religion clauses and how he would interpret them on the High Court. . . . .