California legislature and unions block volunteer help
August 27, 2008
Look for the Union Label, California! Dan Weintraub reports that the California State Legislature has held up an exemption for volunteers that want to help public works projects that receive government money; for instance library, hospital, and school field trip volunteers, to name just a few. Democratic Assembly opponents, looking to protect public employee unions, have held up a vote for an exemption for volunteers (Assembly Bill 2537) by requiring a $4,000,000 study to make sure libraries just aren’t trying to cut down on union labor hours. With the budget the way it is, such an outrageous price tag for a study that won’t cost that much unless Senator Perata does it will not even get to the floor for a vote. Since we know Messers DeSaulnier and Torlakson can’t explain this one to their dumbfounded constituents, perhaps Assembly District 15 candidates Abram Wilson or Joan Buchanan can make sense of this buffoonery?
Comments
2 Responses to “California legislature and unions block volunteer help”
Got something to say?
Loading ...
To the Editor:
A brutal assault on freedom of worship is being made by the California State Legislature.
The legislature’s plan to deny volunteer labor to a tax-exempt organization that receives government funds, could, for example, prevent church members from volunteering to help with a bake sale.
The lesson to be learned from the legislature’s stupidity is to keep goverment and its money out of any religious activity.
Government may seem to mean well when it gives money to religious organizations.
The reality is that government’s giving money to a place of worship makes the place of worship a slave to government.
Faith-based organizations must resist the temptation to take any funds from goverment.
Richard S. Colman
Orinda, CA
Aug. 28, 2008
Richard, I appreciate your desire to protect government from faith-based groups, but increasingly the case is this:
faith-based groups offer services to customers who were given some service voucher by some state government to FREELY select the provider of their choice. They are not forced to spend it on any preferred provider like the government forces citizens into government schools or be discriminated against.
it is not the case that the faith-based group is “receiving” money from government. Rather the customer is procuring service with their government stipend just like students and vets choose to attend St Marys College with college loan or GI Bill, or decide to seek healthcare or drug rehab from a church related hospital (St Matthews or Presbyterian in SF, for example). They can take their voucher to Planned Parenthood or Options for Women, the choice is theirs and theirs alone.
Yet the Democrats and labor increasingly raise the spector of “discrimination” suits, decertification, and withholding licenses to people, companies and soon institutions that do not even receive federal or state money directly, but refuse to perform an abortion, or place kids in same-sex parent adoptions or require a Mennonite college to hire a Marxist to teach the religion course just to upset the Anabaptists.
So it is not just an assault on freedom of worship but a ham-fisted attack on the liberty of individual conscience that proscribes a specific religious world view that is nothing less than the establishment of religion by the state;
as this agenda increasingly uses state apparatus and the courts to demand professionals who want a state license to practice medecine, for example, to swear an oath to receive due process as a citizen. (proscriptionism)