The Freedom from Religion Foundation has criticized several cities, including the mayors of Rogers and Springdale, for sponsoring prayer breakfasts on the National Day of Prayer last week.

The Northwest Arkansas adjunct of the Democrat-Gazette has reported further (pay wall) on the story. Unsurprisingly, the cities are not too concerned about complaints of First Amendment violations. Rogers Mayor Greg Hines told the newspaper "if the organization has a problem with the Rogers Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast, it can 'bring a team of lawyers and sue us.'"

The mayors claim they didn't really sponsor the events, though they do devote time to organizing and selling tickets. There, of course, comes the rub, which even Springdale Mayor Doug Sprouse gingerly acknowledged. If there's a problem with his taxpayer-paid secretary selling tickets for the Christian event and "taking minutes," he said he'd make adjustments. Let us hope. Or else maybe she could sell tickets to the mosque's bean pie supper, too.

The prayer breakfasts last week were observances of the National Day of Prayer, as proclaimed by the president and governor. Rather than celebrate pluralism, however, they've tended to become organizing points for evangelical Christians, the Foundation says.

The National Day of Prayer Taskforce annually organizes numerous evangelical Christian events, often on public property with government speakers, which exclude non-evangelicals and nonChristians.

“We are shocked at the bad manners of these mayors who align themselves with events advertised as ‘Christian evangelicals need only apply.’ This kind of meddling in religion and promotion of one religion over another is what one would expect in a theocracy, not in our secular republic,” said Gaylor.

Rogers and Springdale officials insist their participation is a volunteer effort and not a government event. Rogers held its breakfast at the Cross Church, with Ryan Hale of the Walton Family Foundation as speaker. Former Hog football coach Ken Hatfield spoke to the Springdale breakfast at the Holiday Inn. Both events' tickets paid for costs and excess went to charity.

• PREACHING PAYS: His-and-her mansions are among the benefits for TBN's Paul and Janice Crouch

If you don't read anything else today, read the New York Times report on a family battle that's roiling the Trinity Broadcasting Network religious TV empire and the luxurious lifestyle that's been revealed as a consequence.

Matched sets of mansions for Paul and Janice Crouch.

Private jets.

Hotel room and RV for dogs.

Slotting employees as "ministers;" as such Social Security contributions aren't required.

$1,000 dinners and meal expenses for mama, poppa and son running, in all, about $300,000 a year.

Employees said the Crouches believed their faith justified any extravagance. Among the explanations and defense offered by the empire's lawyer:

Extolling TBN’s prominence and programs, Mr. May said the spending that some call opulent “is necessary to convey the ministry’s position of accomplishment."

Viewers want a little of that prosperity gospel. They pour in almost $100 million a year in support.

settled upon a partisan power play to subvert the First Amendment rights they claim. Look, nobody’s forced to use contraceptives; it’s an individual’s choice, nobody else’s. Religious organizations have the right to believe anything they like, but not to impose those beliefs upon others. By essentially demanding a Catholic veto, the bishops and their GOP allies would impose their theological views upon millions of American women as a condition of employment.

That’s not “liberty,” it’s liberty’s opposite; and precisely what the First Amendment was written to prevent.

The bishops' nitpicking of the Obama compromise is placed in the context of several bishops' attendance at Newt Gingrich's third wedding.

PS — New polling shows a huge majority support Obama's plan for birth control coverage, including Catholic voters. A majority, including Catholics, also support either legal marriage or same-sex union for gay couples. Among evangelical voters, 43 percent support marriage or civil union (18 for marriage, 25 for civil union).

Lyons' full column on the jump.

Highly recommended: Linda Greenhouse's careful examination of the furor of the Obama administration rule to guarantee woman access to birth control pills and other contraception in most employee health insurance plans.

Cries of religious discrimination are drowning out the facts, law and reality, Greenhouse explains. For example, about conscience:

An obvious starting point is with the 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women who, just like other American women, have exercised their own consciences and availed themselves of birth control at some point during their reproductive lives. So it’s important to be clear that the conscientious objection to the regulation comes from an institution rather than from those whose consciences it purports to represent. (Catholic women actually have a higher rate of abortion than other American women, but I’ll stick to birth control for now.)

And what of the Catholic-affiliated hospitals?

Permitting Catholic hospitals to withhold contraception coverage from their 765,000 employees would blow a gaping hole in the regulation. The 629-hospital Catholic health care system is a major and respected health care provider, serving one in every six hospital patients and employing nearly 14 percent of all hospital staff in the country. Of the top 10 revenue-producing hospital systems in 2010, four were Catholic. The San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West, the fifth biggest hospital system in the country, had $11 billion in revenue last year and treated 6.2 million patients.

These institutions, as well as Catholic universities — not seminaries, but colleges and universities whose doors are open to all — are full participants in the public square, receiving a steady stream of federal dollars. They assert — indeed, have earned — the right to the same benefits that flow to their secular peers. What they now claim is a right to special treatment: to conscience that trumps law.

Religion trumps law you say?

But in fact, that is not a principle that our legal system embraces. Just ask Alfred Smith and Galen Black, two members of the Native American Church who were fired from their state jobs in Oregon for using the illegal hallucinogen peyote in a religious ceremony and who were then deemed ineligible for unemployment compensation because they had lost their jobs for “misconduct.” They argued that their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion trumped the state’s unemployment law.

In a 1990 decision, Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court disagreed. Even a sincere religious motivation, in the absence of some special circumstance like proof of government animus, does not merit exemption from a “valid and neutral law of general applicability,” the court held. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion, which was joined by, among others, the notoriously left wing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

She goes on to outline changing law and complications. It is important stuff, even if it is technical and requires study beyond the 10-word sound bites that have already been perfected on this topic.

PS — Greenhouse mentions the Obama administration's curiously muted defense, something that marked the health care debate and left the field clear to opponents. It's happening again and Democrats are going wobbly on an issue for which there is broad popular — and Catholic rank-and-file — support. That issue would be non-discrimination in health coverage for women who want birth control pills for contraception or other health reasons.

Another good article in Mother Jones on the Republican war on contraception.

And some facts and myth-busting here.

And here, some polling data.

Rep. Justin Harris wants the Arkansas legislature to interpose itself against the Constitution of the U.S. and block a proposed DHS rule that would ban using public money to teach religion in pre-schools. Harris is scoring hundreds of thousands for doing just this and so has Sen. Johnny Key.

Real simple: 1) Harris and Key can take the money and stop teaching religion. 2) They can teach religion and stop taking the money. 3) They can take the money, keep teaching religion, get the state sued and Arkansas pays a ton in attorney fees plus more national embarrassment.

UPDATE: Further fulmination:

* WHAT ABOUT JOHNNY KEY: Sen. Key, whose family rakes in a million or more public dollars at daycares that have included religious exercises, seems to be absent from press coverage of events. Why? Because he's one of the saner members of the Republican delegation? He, too, should be held accountable. Does he contend he may hold religious exercises with public money? Does he oppose the rule?

* WATCH JUSTIN HARRIS: Justin Harris SAYS he won't hold religion instruction until after the 7-hour state-financed school day. Watch him like a hawk. Is he using state-paid employees who receive no other money from him to continue to care for children and read Bible to them? If he is, he's violating the Constitution.

* THE STATE'S FAILURE: Justin Harris tried to set off a witch hunt yesterday — and the D-G took him up on it — to make the story about who called in an outside group over his blatant unconstitutional actions. Matt Campbell called Americans United for Church and State because the state had failed to act. Harris' religious orientation was a well-known fact, often mentioned here. The state Human Services Department and Education Department turned a blind eye. It wouldn't enforce a statute that is on the books to prohibit this. The state needs no rule to enforce the Constitution. This should not be a question about letting American United sue Justin Harris. This should have long ago been open-and-shut. The state should have ceased providing money to religious schools. It didn't. And now Justin Harris wants you to believe he's the damaged party, not the Constitution. Gov. Beebe, DHS, Attorney General McDaniel. Do any of you have any respect for the Constitution? DHS, clearly, has little. It has written the superfluous rules in a way that, without 24-hour monitoring, Harris is almost certain to continue to flout church-state separation. Disappointing. Take the preacher's money away and let him sue Arkansas. An outside agency shouldn't have to carry the ball to get the state to do right.

* THE STATE'S FAILURE II: While it was so busy letting Justin Harris do whatever he wanted at his publicly funded ($800,000 or so counting food and other programs) daycare, DHS apparently wasn't keeping its eye on the ball with a Head Start provider in Russellville, which had to shut temporarily this week because it was out of money. This kind of thing is rarely a one-day hiccup. (This problem is unrelated to Head Start operations based at UAMS in Little Rock.)

The Catholic Diocese has issued a statement by Bishop Anthony B. Taylor (on the jump) asking people to fight a ruling by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that requires most private health care plans to cover sterilization and contraception. Though "religious employers" can opt out, the church believes the exemption does not go far enough, because Catholic hospitals would not be exempt.

In his statement, Taylor says, “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law," which he says is a violation of First Amendment rights.

Taylor's is part of a nationwide Catholic protest. From the Diocesan news release:

The Catholic Church believes sterilization and contraception, some of which can cause abortions, are immoral because they sever the inherent link between sex and procreation and limit the spouses’ total gift of self to one another.

(It should be noted that for women who do want affordable access to birth control, the ruling is a blessing.)

• LET US PRAY: Rep. Justin Harris.

He didn't respond to my e-mail seeking comment, but he told the NWA hybrid newspaper operation that he'll be happy to tell his teachers to provide religious instruction before or after the seven-hour school day required for state funding. He said he objected to being unable to pray with parents or others who come to school during the day for his counseling. He also isn't happy about getting unannounced inspections.

This is precisely the loophole I figured he'd exploit in rules issued yesterday by the state and reinforced by DHS answers to questions I posed. DHS says the money it sends to Harris can't be used for religious instruction. But his private business is welcome to do whatever it wants outside the seven hours of care required under the ABC taxpayer program for daycares. Never mind there'd be no kids, no program, no building without the taxpayer money.

Think about it. What if the extra hours are worked by people whose only source of salary from Harris is the state ABC pay? Can he really argue they are doing this on their own time? Can he make those extra hours a condition of employment? Can he really claim the extended hours provided children enrolled in the program are not supported by the ABC money for the entire time they spend in a facility that wouldn't exist but for tax money? No, he can't. But there are now many ways for him to skin the cat and keep the dollars flowing, a half-million from ABC and tens of thousands more from nutrition and other tax-funded programs.

The religionists believe it is their calling to do mission work, with tax money if they can get it. The state of Arkansas has provided them loopholes. The state had already demonstrated its lack of concern for the U.S. Constitution. Its failure to enforce existing — and explicit — state law until Americans United for Separation of Church and State made a complaint about religious instruction is a pretty good measure of how rigorously it is likely to enforce the new rules.

UPDATE: Justin Harris also Twittered today:

Find it curious that current AR Administration is more worried about Jesus being taught than the AR Forestry Comm. Are we going Rogue?

UPDATE II: I heard from Americans United's staff attorney, Ian Smith, today. He said the proposed rules contained much that was praiseworthy. "Overall, I think they're pretty good." But ..... he identified problems, chiefly two I've already mentioned. He said the organization hasn't decided what form its objections will take, whether written comments during the comment period or testimony. He explained that the organization fears the state hasn't gone far enough to insure public money doesn't support religious exercises before or after an arbitrary time period and it thinks the law doesn't allow the posting of religious materials as the state suggests it does. More:

Do Republican voters in the South have a problem with Mormonism? South Carolina exit polling provides a hint:

Exit polls show that 43 percent of voters who said that the candidates' religious beliefs mattered "a great deal" went for Gingrich. Only 9 percent went for Romney — a lower percentage than he netted overall, where he is running in second. In contrast, of voters who said the religious beliefs of candidates didn't matter to them at all, Romney won 42 percent.

So the self-professed South Carolina devout went for a serial adulterer over a church-leading family man.

Does Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher, have such a short memory that he forgets his own Mormon-baiting in 2008? No, he remembers all right. But, by his account, you just misremember it as a cynical and slimy play on religious bias.

Now, says Huck, not that there's anything wrong with being Mormon, Romney needs to give a little speech reassuring all the Baptists that he's not intent on making them believe in golden plates. He managed — classic Huckster — to drop an allusion to another favorite bit of religious bigotry in commenting on whether Mitt Romney's religion influenced votes:

"I'd like to believe that's not the issue," Huckabee told Fox Business host Neil Cavuto. "Four years ago, I was accused of making it an issue. It wasn't for me then, it isn't for me now. I would no more not vote for someone because they were Mormon than I would vote for somebody like Al Gore because he's a Baptist, for heaven's sake. I think that's a ridiculous reason to vote or not vote for someone, unless they've done something that's so wacky — like mix the blood of little children together in a public ceremony."

Blood libel, anyone?

This may be more typical than I know, but it's a slow morning and I liked the sound of a letter from First Assembly of God in North Little Rock, which is celebrating its 100th birthday by giving away $100,000 — $10,000 each to 10 organizations or even individuals that "are impacting the lives of others in the Central Arkansas area every day."

Applications for the money must be submitted by Feb. 15. Find more info at the church website.