Response to Lew Daly on church-state separation and the labor movement

Peter Laarman responds here to the Lew Daly essay, "The Church of Labor," to which I linked the other day.  Notwithstanding my own differences with Daly's view, I don't think Laarman's response is very powerful.  He spends a lot of his response unnecessarily pointing out something that I don't think Daly ever questions, namely, that Catholicism and the Catholic Church were not the only driving factors in the rise of the labor movement. 

He then objects to what he describes as Daly's proposal to "relax traditional church-state separation in order to permit delivery of tax-supported social services by overtly sectarian groups."  But, of course, Daly does no such thing.  He proposes, instead, that we move away from our relatively recent mis-understandings of church-state separation, and return instead to "traditional church-state separation," which focused more on institutional differentiation and welcomed cooperation between religious and secular entities in pursuit of the common good.  Also misguided is his suggestion that Daly is asking us to "do away with this fusty constitutional barrier" or to "pulverize" the "Wall of Separation."  No, he wants us to "get" the barrier right.

By the end of the piece, the reasons Laarman opposes Daly's "libertas ecclesiae schtick" become clear:  Laarman disagrees with the "religious right" about policy matters, and worries that Daly's (i.e., a more correct) understanding of church-state separation might facilitate the ability of the "religious right" to advance its / their views.  Maybe.  Maybe not.