I did. The example I used was actually not a faith-based group. It would be just a generic landscaping company. Everybody was required to make that attestation in the first instance.
It does touch on, for some, freedom of conscience and religion, as it may have for some of the faith-based groups, but the requirement for that program was that you had to express an opinion. It happened to be an opinion on a specific subject in agreement with the government's policy, but the very fact that you had to express an opinion to qualify is itself a violation of freedom, thought, opinion and belief. That was the problem there.
You're right. It put some groups in the position of having to make a difficult choice. For those that made a principled choice, I would share your view that it required some courage to do so, but they shouldn't have to be in that position.
The difficulty there was that redress against that was very difficult. Had it been a statute, you could have gone to court and maybe gotten an injunction right away. It's possible. We'd have to see whether that was possible. However, when it becomes an attestation and part of the apparatus of the application process, redress was very difficult. There were some court initiatives and then later there was a revision.
If the government had passed a law saying that you had to make that attestation, you could have been in court the next day to seek relief and maybe, if the judge agreed, had some kind of injunction. However, this is a more nebulous requirement and therefore harder to seek redress.