Bush + Jesus = Unprotected Kids

One of the primary goals of President George W. Bush's new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is "to eliminate unnecessary legislative, regulatory, and other bureaucratic barriers that impede effective faith-based and other community efforts to solve social problems." Bush has said that America needs more "faith-based treatment" for addiction and juvenile delinquency and that he would like to "promote alternative licensing regimes to recognize religious training as an alternative form of qualification."

Bad idea. Even leaving aside the dubious constitutionality of government financial support for religious services, deregulation is a recipe for disaster. Recent experience shows why.

Over the last 10 years, more than two dozen teenagers have died in so-called "tough love" rehabilitation facilities that use violent confrontation and exposure to primitive living conditions as a means to a cure. At least three girls in different facilities died from dehydration or hyperthermia following forced exercise; a 16-year-old California boy died of an infection after staff laughed at him and forced him to carry a basket filled with his vomit- and excrement-covered clothes; a 12-year-old Florida boy died in 2000 when a 320-pound counselor physically restrained him (the counselor said he thought the boy's complaints that he was unable to breathe were "fake").

Not all victims of such "treatment" die, of course: Many just end up with post-traumatic stress disorder or in a coma, or are discovered tied up in closets. Some of the programs where these incidents occurred were explicitly faith-based; some were not. None, however, were properly regulated.

Yet despite these cautionary examples -- and despite the testimony of numerous experts who say that what is needed to prevent them from recurring is more federal oversight, not less -- Bush's enthusiasm for these programs has not waned. In 1997, after Texas regulators had tried to shut down a Christian rehabilitation program called Teen Challenge because its staff failed to meet educational requirements, then-Governor Bush responded by scuttling all the state's training and safety regulations for such facilities. And in a speech two years later, Bush praised the fact that at Teen Challenge, "if you don't work, you don't eat." Now that he's ensconced in the White House, Bush intends to deregulate Teen Challenge-type programs nationwide.

Our new president's enthusiasm for deregulation of faith-based services is not hard to figure. As a onetime heavy drinker who says Jesus saved him as well as a Republican with classic antipathy toward government, Bush sees in faith-based services the opportunity both to trumpet his faith and to shrink the size of government. (Why have taxpayers funded government programs when religious groups will do the job cheaper?) But is there even more to his support of faith-based programs than meets the eye?

Mel Sembler, who made his fortune as a shopping mall magnate, is a longtime Bush-family supporter and friend. He was also the Republican Party's campaign finance director from 1997 to 2001. Sembler's the man who devised the term "Republican Regents" for contributors of more than $250,000 to the GOP during W.'s 2000 campaign.

He is also the founder of Straight, Inc. Started in 1976, Straight, Inc., was based on the "therapeutic community" approach pioneered several years earlier, which involved addicts forcing harsh discipline and a surrender to God on one another. (The first "therapeutic community" program, called Synanon, went on to become a violent cult, some of whose members placed snakes in their detractors' mailboxes.)

Whether Sembler has used his fundraising prowess as leverage to pressure President Bush into funding faith-based programs is impossible to determine. But he's clearly got the Bush family's ear -- and claims to have been responsible for former first lady Nancy Reagan's interest in the drug fight. In any case, the story of Straight, Inc., is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes that deregulating youth services facilities is a good idea.