Sweet Memories or Maudlin Displays?

Opinions mixed on public tributes to victims of crashes or crimes:

It's no surprise that people have passionate opinions about the roadside memorials that dot Sonoma County.

These remembrances are a public airing of private grief, and invite reflection and comment.

We invited Press Democrat readers to offer their opinions in reaction to a story by Staff Writer Derek J. Moore about roadside memorials that have been carted away recently by an unknown person or persons.

Are they fitting tributes, or eyesores? Are they distracting to drivers, or reminders to be safe on the road?

What, if anything, should be done about them?

More than 100 readers responded in e-mails, or in online forums on pressdemocrat.com.

Here are some of your thoughts:

"I UNDERSTAND that some prefer to have these roadside memorials maintained as a reminder to others. We felt that it would only serve as a point for vandalism and decay and we could not endure that.

"I did not want my son's memory to serve as a painful ongoing reminder of the evils of speeding and alcohol. Perhaps selfish in my feelings, but I couldn't handle it."

-- Benita Jeppson, mother

of Daniel Stephens, 20, who died in a crash in Santa Rosa in April 2005

"IT'S HARD ENOUGH to lose a loved one, but it's kind of comforting in a way to pass the site and see the flowers, etc., that many people leave behind.

"I speak for my whole family when I say that I'm grateful that the business where the accident occurred allowed my family and friends to leave tributes and such."

-- Jimmy Pineda, Ukiah,

whose nephew and three of his

friends died in a 2005 car crash

"I FIND THE roadside death shrines to be morbidly offensive, horribly gross, and visually insulting. Those who elevate these scenes of life-ending trauma into places of worship are hugely insensitive to those of us who must suffer the repeated reminder and mental image of violence and gore as it occurred during the moment of a loved one's death.

"Personally, I don't know why anyone would want to constantly remind me of their loved one in that kind of context."

-- Mark Patty, Windsor

"WE ALL NEED to grieve and deal with our losses in different ways. If going to the site helps a grieving relative -- without causing anyone else danger because of the location of the parked vehicle or whatever -- I lean on the side of grace. It's got to be difficult to have a family member die in an accident. Why add to anyone's burden?"

-- Michelle Ule, Santa Rosa

"I DROVE BY a memorial south of Sebastopol on Highway 116 for several years. I often found myself saddened -- saddened for people I did not know, seeing raw grief and pain displayed there on the side of the road. Each life has enough pain of its own, I'd think, and I found myself wishing the family would pick an anniversary and take the memorial down so I would no longer have to share a stranger's sorrow."

-- Karen Jones, Sebastopol

"IT IS GETTING to the point that if you go to a cemetery, the flowers or remembrances that you have left are often taken by vandals. I know because it has happened to my husband's grave. I say, please, leave the roadside memorials alone so that I can say a prayer for those that have lost their lives to drunken drivers."

-- Peggy Krahl, Windsor

"OVERALL, I believe these are good and serve a purpose to remind us to drive safe. They are better than a billboard and take less time to 'read' (for those who think they are a distraction).

"My only suggestion is that they be uniform. There are states which have adopted a uniform white cross to represent where an accident took place and a life was lost."

-- John Doolittle,

Bodega Bay

"THE LOSS of a loved one used to be a private event, kept within the confines of the family. But like everything else in our society -- cell phone conversations, celebrity mishaps -- personal tragedy has to be advertised for all to see.

"The Christian religious movement especially finds every opportunity to proselytize their point of view and shame on them for using personal loss as a pulpit. I can't recall seeing statues of Buddha, Stars of David, or smiley faces dotting the countryside. Or is it that only Christians die on the road?"

-- Lee Hodo, Santa Rosa

"WHEN SOMEONE is cremated, we have no place to visit, and share our days. These memorials do that for us. And even if it got to one person, to remind them to be a little more careful when they drive, or remind them that life is too short, or to tell the people you care about how much they mean to you . . . you can't put a price on that."

-- Monica Alberigi,

Cazadero, who saw a friend

die after his car struck

a tree in 2004

"TO BE BLUNT, it pisses me off that they remove these without posting something so the loved ones can remove the things people left, including the things I put there like pictures.

"I don't believe they are distracting to drivers. It's a memorial. Too bad if you can't deal with seeing it. How do you think we feel?"

-- Lynne Barber, mother of Ashley Morse, 18, who

collapsed and died in July on Forest Hills Road in Forestville

"WITH SOME people finding comfort in the roadside shrines while others feel pain, and some seeing the shrines as welcome reminders to be safe while others see them as a distraction or an 'eyesore,' it seems that a compromise is needed.

"Perhaps a policy that allowed the shrines to be up for a period of up to one year with the stipulation that the shrines be removed by the people who put them up on the anniversary of the death of the loved one."

-- Teresa Martinelli,

Sonoma

"LAYING FLOWERS or a similar gesture immediately after the accident is perhaps a way of saying goodbye. Beyond that, we feel a nice tombstone at their gravesite is the appropriate memorial.

"Donate a bench at their favorite spot, plant a tree in their name, put in a nice garden. There are many possibilities."

-- Lew and Adrienne Larson, Sebastopol

Roadside Memorial Sites

Small monuments are reminders that inattention leads to tragedy:

At the T intersection of East Washington Street and Adobe Road in Petaluma, four crosses provided a grim reminder of the risks associated with automobile travel.

No one could pass that place without noticing. No local person could pass that corner without remembering.

Four young people died here.

The four Sonoma County teenagers were killed in December of 2005 when the car in which they were riding drove into the path of a pickup truck.

Those memorials are gone now. For reasons known only to the perpetrators, these and three other roadside monuments around the county have been hauled away in recent months, as columnist Chris Smith and Staff Writer Derek J. Moore have reported.

For families and friends who honored these sites, these thefts only add to the sadness.

Technically, memorials posted on state property along public roadways are against the law, but state officials are trying to exercise common sense.

So long as the monuments don't become too large, too messy or a distraction to passing motorists, they aren't hurting anyone.

These are inevitably subjective judgments, but until this summer, no one had tried to intervene.

These tributes also serve as a signal to passersby that this intersection or this curve in the road may be dangerous if you're not driving with care.

The vandals who have deputized themselves as the roadside police apparently don't care about the heartbreak they cause families or the possibility that one of these memorials might save other lives.

Obama Names Republicans He'll Work With

"_blank">The AP reports:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama often says he will be a candidate that will bring both parties together and Saturday he named a few of the Republicans he would reach out to if elected.

``There are some very capable Republicans who I have a great deal of respect for,'' Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press. ``The opportunities are there to create a more effective relationship between parties.''

Among the Republicans he would seek help from are Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana, John Warner of Virginia and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Obama said.

``On foreign policy I've worked very closely with Dick Lugar,'' Obama said. ``I consider him one of my best friends in the Senate. He's someone I would actively seek counsel and advice from when it came to foreign policy.''

``Senator Warner is another example of somebody with great wisdom, although I don't always agree with him on every issue,'' Obama said. ``I would also seek out people like Tom Coburn, who is probably the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate. He has become a friend of mine.''

Part of Washington's problem is that President Bush has created a partisan atmosphere, he said.

``The Bush-Cheney administration has perfected the perpetual campaign, what I call the 50-plus-one election strategy, where you just presume half the country is red and half the country is blue,'' Obama said.

Later in Miami, Obama reiterated his call for Cuban-American families to be able to have more contact with their relatives in Cuba.

To rousing applause at the same Little Havana auditorium where Republican Ronald Reagan once campaigned, Obama said: ``Just 90 miles from here there is a country where justice and freedom are out of reach. That's why my policy toward Cuba will be guided by one word: Liberty.''

He said there are no better ambassadors for change on the communist island than the Cuban Americans who send money to relatives.

``It can help make their families less dependent on Fidel Castro. That's the way to bring about real change in Cuba,'' Obama said. ``It's time we had a president who realized that.''

Obama addressed a crowd of more than 1,000 four days after he published an opinion piece to The Miami Herald that said restrictions that limit how often Cuban Americans can travel to Cuba to visit family and how much money they can send relatives should be loosened.

The Cuban-exile vote is considered key to winning Florida, and top presidential candidates have generally followed the recommendations of the community's most hard-line and vocal leaders, who support a full embargo against Castro's government.

But many in the large Cuban American community want to be able to visit and help family and support the idea of looser restrictions.

Obama said he wouldn't lift the current trade embargo, and said his offer to normalize relations in a post-Castro Cuba would be made after the country opened up to democratic change.

``Until there's justice in Cuba, there's no justice anywhere,'' Obama said. ``We will talk to our enemies as well as our friends and both to our enemies and to our friends, we will tell them the truth and tell them what we stand for.''

Obama was in Florida at the same time the Democratic National Committee voted to strip Florida of all its presidential delegates if the state party sticks to a plan for a Jan. 29 primary. He said, however, that Florida will still be large player in the general election and that he will seek to remain competitive here.

``The national party has a difficult task, which is to try to create some order out of chaos,'' Obama said. ``My job is really not to speculate on how to make it all work. I'm a candidate, I'm like a player on the field. I shouldn't be setting up the rules.''

Robert Fisk: "Even I Question The 'Truth' About 9/11"

From The Independent, Robert Fisk writes:

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

How The House Committee on Oversight & Govt Reform's Ranking Member's Summer Vacation Is Going

Americans Against Escalation of the War in Iraq hosted a Town Hall Meeting with Representative Tom Davis (R-VA) and Rand Beers (former Counterterrorism Adviser in the Bush administration, 2002-03) on 8/23/07.

Videos of the meeting:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Who's Removing Roadside Memorials?

Renewed debate over whether sites are appropriate:

Pattie Hansen took comfort in the five crosses that marked the spot on a Petaluma road where her only daughter died in a crash last year.

Then one day this summer, the crosses were gone.

"I sat in the car and cried," she said.

Roadside memorials are disappearing across Sonoma County, including at the spot on Industrial Avenue in Petaluma where 43-year-old Tami Wilson was killed in October when she lost control of her pickup.

At least four memorials have been hauled away since June, including three in and near Petaluma, and a fourth in Forestville.

The removals rekindle a debate over whether the personal items left behind by loved ones are appropriate expressions of grief, or maudlin -- perhaps even dangerous -- eyesores.

Even some victims' families are torn over the issue.

Hansen said her husband has begged her not to go to the spot where the couple's daughter died, because doing so always unhinges her.

She goes anyway.

"I told my husband that's where she died. That's where her soul left her body," Hansen said.

After discovering the crosses gone in June, Hansen said she drove to city offices and the Police Department to see if anyone might know what happened to them. The crosses were on city property, but Hansen said she was told nobody knew who took them.

Officials with Caltrans and the CHP said their employees were not responsible for the removal of memorials on state property, even though the items violate state law.

"They're technically forbidden, but we try to work with families and let those be maintained by families as long as it's not imposing on anyone else's safety," said Michelle Squyer of Caltrans.

The removals have spawned any number of theories as to why someone would want to see them gone. Was someone weary of these visible displays of grief? Were they offended by the religious iconography? Was it a teenage prank?

Some have argued the memorials can be dangerous distractions for motorists -- an irony because many families say they are motivated to erect the markers in part to encourage others to be safer on the roads.

"I hope the memorials say to other people: 'Slow down. This could be you or another child,' " Patty Julius said of the two steel crosses on Valley Ford Road west of Petaluma where her 20-year-old daughter, Jessica Liparini, and a teen were killed in a 2004 car crash.

So far, Liparini's memorial has not been targeted. But four crosses on Adobe Road and East Washington Street near Petaluma that were erected shortly after a crash killed four teens in December 2005 have disappeared.

Those crosses were highly visible to motorists who have to pause at the intersection because stop signs and flashing lights were installed there in the wake of the deadly crash.

Around the time the crosses were removed, men wearing bright orange shirts were spotted working in the area. But even if they were Caltrans employees, Squyer said, they would not have simply carted the memorial away.

"Our maintenance folks are often the very first to arrive at a crash, and they are often the last to be cleaning up after it. It hits these guys in the heart," she said.

Besides safety concerns, some view the memorials as unwanted intrusions into their daily lives.

"Some of these things are bloody ugly," said David Evans, a Sebastopol graphic artist. "I think Sonoma County is a beautiful area. The sides of roads are not boneyards."

As an alternative, the state -- for a $1,000 fee -- offers a Victim Memorial Sign Program for those who are killed by a driver who is under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

One such sign on Highway 12 honors the memory of Alan Liu, a 31-year-old computer engineer from Mountain View who was riding his bicycle in April 2004 when he was killed by a drunken driver.

The sign is modest compared with some of the more elaborate roadside memorials that loved ones erect themselves.

Still, one has to wonder why someone suddenly took issue with Jaime Lunny's memorial, which was erected a decade ago after the 20-year-old Sonoma woman was killed by a drunken driver who crossed over the yellow line and hit her head-on.

The memorial on Stage Gulch Road east of Adobe Road included sunflowers, a cross and a ceramic tile with Lunny's initials that was made by her brother.

People have been passing by the memorial for years without complaint. But in late July, someone decided it was time for most of the items to go. Only the cross, which is attached to a fence, was left behind.

"I don't know if they were doing it to be mean or they were bored or they don't like those things," Diane Lunny said. "I wish they would have said something, because those things weren't mine."

The memorial was maintained by her daughter's friends and other family members. Diane Lunny said she never stopped at the site herself, although she frequently travels that road to visit her mother in Marin.

"That's not me," she said. "I wouldn't go there and dwell."

Her ambivalence raises the point of whether roadside memorials help or hinder the grieving process.

"I've heard talk around the office that we're not celebrating a person's life," CHP Officer Kimberly Lemons said. "We're celebrating the place where she died. We wonder if family members get peace out of seeing that, and if it is worth it."

Lemons recalled one instance when a woman called to complain about a memorial that had been placed at Piner and Olivet roads near Santa Rosa in honor of a 3-year-old boy and 7-year-old girl who were killed in a 2003 car crash.

"She said: 'I can't take it anymore. Two little kids died in front of my house, and that was bad enough. Now I have to look at that,' " Lemons said.

Lemons said the children's family agreed to take the memorial away. She said she wonders whether the person or persons now carting away memorials in the county could be similarly fed up with the public displays of grief.

"It makes me wonder if someone who lives locally can't take the pain anymore," she said.

Hansen said she is planning to erect another cross at the spot where her daughter died on Nov. 15, which was Wilson's birthday. But she said she'll take it down the following day.

"I sure hope nobody takes it before I get out there and get it," she said.

U.S. Judge Rules Public Funds Can Be Used For Church Renovations

The Federal district court ruling in Michigan highlights a shift away from strict church-state separation.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Should citizens' tax dollars be spent to renovate houses of worship?

The answer to that question used to be a resounding "No, it's unconstitutional." But Aug. 8, a federal judge broke new ground. He ruled that the city of Detroit could partially reimburse three churches for renovations they made to their buildings to make the downtown area more attractive before the 2006 Super Bowl. (The city paid numerous property owners for renovations.)

Public funds can go to churches for improvements that serve a civic purpose, but not to promote religion, ruled Judge Avern Cohn of the US District Court of Eastern Michigan. In practical terms, that meant the churches could be reimbursed for repairs to their buildings and parking lots, which "convey no religious message," he said, but not for new signs or stained-glass windows.

"This is the first time we've gotten a court decision on government bricks-and-mortar spending in a very long time," says Robert Tuttle, a law professor at George Washington University. And it's likely to capture the attention of states and cities across the United States as they consider similar church-state matters.

The ruling troubles those who hold to a strict separation of church and state, including the group that brought the case against Detroit's downtown development agency.

"If it's OK for the government to pay for bricks and mortar, what's to stop it from out and out building churches?" asks Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists Inc. (AAI) "The ramifications are tremendous."

The ruling represents an attempt to grapple seriously with a changing legal landscape, says Mr. Tuttle, who codirects legal research for the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy based in Albany, N.Y. Pressures have grown in recent years to move away from the idea of a strict separation between church and state. Proponents in legal and religious circles have called for government neutrality toward religion – providing a level playing field where religious and secular entities can compete for public funds. This issue remains highly contentious.

Not long ago, it was deemed unconstitutional for public money to go to groups whose mission was "pervasively sectarian," in the language of the US Supreme Court. (The First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits any government "establishment of religion.")

In 1973, the Supreme Court stated in regard to religious structures that government "may not maintain such buildings or renovate them when they fall into disrepair." That decision has never been repudiated, but in 2000, the Court ruled (in Mitchell v. Helms) that government can provide funds to religious groups as long as the money does not support religious activities. Parsing that in practice becomes the challenge.

President Bush's faith-based initiative made funding of religious organizations for a variety of social services a prime goal. Some of those projects have been challenged in court, a few successfully, for promoting a particular religion.

In 2003, the administration announced it was opening the door to direct funding for renovations to religious buildings through the Save America's Treasures program to preserve cultural landmarks. (The Department of Justice later issued legal opinions that could allow funding religious structures under other federal programs.)

The first grant, for $317,000, was given to restore the windows in Boston's Old North Church, made famous by Paul Revere. Later that year, $375,000 went to Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., the nation's oldest synagogue. Both are active houses of worship, but they are also historical landmarks that draw visitors in large numbers. No challenge has been mounted to those grants.

"We have well over half a million visitors each year, including some 70,000 school kids," says Ed Pignone, director of Old North Foundation. The 1723 church is "Boston's most visited historic site," he says.

Other instances of direct government aid are being challenged, however. When Congress passed a bill specifically to fund the restoration of California missions, 19 of which are active Catholic churches, Americans United for Separation of Church and State said it would sue. The missions have yet to raise the matching money that would trigger the grant.

And last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit in Louisiana to halt the payment of $120,000 in state money to two churches. The funds were earmarked in an appropriations bill, without any purpose or justification given.

AAI is considering whether to appeal the Michigan ruling. Although they had a partial victory (some church expenses were not reimbursed), they say they can't let the bricks-and-mortar argument stand.

"You could easily build a megachurch and avoid the religion iconography," Ms. Johnson says. "Then the church could later say, 'Now we'll put in the religious symbols ourselves.' " There's nothing secular about a church, she adds.

Others argue that religious groups frequently provide a secular service that makes them worthy of public support, even without setting up a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit to ensure no funds go to religious activities. This is the thinking behind Mr. Bush's faith-based initiative.

Partners for Sacred Places (PSP), a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization founded in 1989 to help preserve older and historic houses of worship, seeks contributions from private and public sources to help congregations repair their buildings.

Partners conducted a study of 100 congregations in six cities. It found that, on average, each maintained four community service programs. And 80 percent of the people who entered the buildings in a given week were nonmembers – people receiving those community services.

To donors, "we say it isn't supporting a religion, but supporting everybody – they don't make distinctions between kids or seniors of one faith or another," says Bob Jaeger, PSP executive director. "The other argument is that these are historic buildings ... that are an important part of a community's heritage."

PSP set up a fund in Pennsylvania and raised $2 million in donations from the William Penn Foundation, the state government (three different sources), and individuals to restore buildings in southeastern counties. The goal is to help congregations across the state.

One beneficiary is St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in west Philadelphia. "It's an enormous building ... and they've been struggling for 20 years with how to fix the [three] domes which have water leaks," says Mr. Jaeger. "The church has an amazing physical presence and a cluster of programs for the community – we gave them $100,000."

For strict separationists like Johnson, no tax money should help a church – "religion should be doing that themselves."

For Tuttle, the Michigan decision seriously tackles the changes that have gone on in the law: the shift from barring any funding to religious institutions to barring funding for any religious activities. It comes down neither on the strict separationists side nor on the blanket neutrality approach of the Bush administration.

Instead, it says that "when a government makes a grant for secular purposes to a broad set of grantees, it can include churches," Tuttle adds. "But it has to be careful it is not directly supporting the religious mission or ministry."