Having cake, eating cake?
One of the interesting effects of the right’s advocacy for H.R. 3 (the legislation on abortion Beth and I have blogged about recently) is the way they have to justify their seemingly contradictory positions on “fungibility.” The fungibility argument centers around the definition of federal funding as it relates to tax subsidies and exemptions. Let’s say an organization has two programs, Program A and Program B. The current standard is that any government support given to the organization for Program A only counts as federal funding for Program A, not Program B. H.R.3′s proponents argue that government support of Program A reduces the organization’s overall financial burden, freeing up other money and resources to devote to Program B, and that this indirect relief should count as “government funding” of Program B.
In the case of abortion and health care, religious right organizations claim that even if individuals purchase their own abortion coverage, any tax subsidy for health care coverage that includes abortion constitutes federal funding– which is why they’re trying to pass the extreme H.R. 3 “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.” But in the case of church exemptions and school vouchers for parochial schools, these same groups argue that a tax deduction or subsidy is not a form of government funding (because if it were, it’d be a clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment).
In a House of Representatives hearing on the bill last week, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) exposed the incoherence of their argument while questioning Cathy Ruse from the Family Research Council and Richard Doerflinger from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Check out the video:
Neither Ruse nor Doerflinger actually answer Rep. Nadler’s question or justify their contradictory stance on what qualifies as federal funding. As far as I can tell, Rep. Nadler sums it up well when he says they “want to have their cake and eat it too.” Or as Ruth Marcus put it in a November 2009 column: “Your money is fungible but mine isn’t.”