Norman Siegel and the Imam

Editorial of The New York Sun
March 13, 2006

The photograph on our front page of one of the city's most prominent civil liberties lawyers, Norman Siegel, whispering into the ear of Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil made us chuckle. And not only with the realization that the city imam in trouble for his inflammatory remarks about "the Zionists of the media" was savvy enough to know it couldn't hurt to have a lawyer named Siegel. What tickled our sense of irony was that Mr. Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a representative of the American civil liberties mindset that sees a violation of the Establishment Clause riding on the back of every reindeer, is ready to defend the proposition that the city's taxpayers should employ an imam at $76,602 a year to minister to the city's prison population.

We have a feeling that if Mr. Siegel really sat down and reasoned it out, he'd see that, at least by the standards of the civil libertarian movement in which he serves, the 21 full-time and 19 part-time priests, rabbis, imams, and other members of the clergy employed by the city of New York to work in the city's jails ought amount to a violation of the federal First Amendment and the New York State Constitution. We can see various defenses of the idea of the public employing these clergymen, but it's hard to see how such arguments might fit into the ACLU, NYCLU ideology. And even from our own policy perspective, it seems a wasteful expenditure. After all, one of the nation's other large urban prison systems, that of Cook County, Illinois, which serves Chicago, says on its Web site, "the Department maintains ongoing affiliations with a member of major faith groups which provide personnel on a volunteer basis, to meet the expressed religious preferences of all segments of the inmate population."

The operative words there are "volunteer basis." Plenty of privately funded organizations specialize in just this. Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship raises about $50 million a year for evangelical Christian outreach. The Aleph Institute, based in Florida, raises almost $1 million a year in part to serve Jewish prison inmates nationwide. The great irony here is that Mr. Siegel and his ilk have been fighting in court for years to deny law-abiding parents the right to school vouchers, citing the fear that the money would pay for religious education in violation of the state and federal Constitution. Yet criminals get taxpayer-subsidized religious education. In other words, if you are a parochial school parent in New York, the left wants to treat you worse than they would a common criminal. Short of school vouchers, the way for Mayor Bloomberg to start equalizing the situation is to put all the prison chaplains, including the extremist imam, on a volunteer basis.