Fundies Not Happy with Obama Faith-Based Plan
It shouldn't come as a surprise, but the first media reports on Barack Obama's plan to expand Bush's faith-based programs were innacurate, claiming that he would allow religious organizations to fire people based on their religion or religious positions. That obviously alarmed a lot of people, including many of our listeners when I discussed this on the show yesterday.
Actually, his position is completely the opposite: Churches must comply with all federal and local laws to get the money. Also, the money would not go to programs where a church pushes its religious agenda (i.e. an HIV counseling program that tells people to go "ex-gay"), something that now has religious conservatives unhappy. This story clarifies some of the confusion:
“If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion,” Mr. Obama said. “Federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs.”
Mr. Obama’s position that religious organizations would not be able to consider religion in their hiring for such programs would constitute a deal-breaker for many evangelicals, said several evangelical leaders, who represent a political constituency Mr. Obama has been trying to court.
“For those of who us who believe in protecting the integrity of our religious institutions, this is a fundamental right,” said Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. “He’s rolling back the Bush protections. That’s extremely disappointing.”
Early in his first term, Mr. Bush issued executive orders expressly allowing religion-based groups receiving federal money to consider religion in their employment decisions, although confusion often remains in this area because of conflicting federal, state and local laws.
Martha Minnow, a professor of law at Harvard University who has written about religion-based initiatives and has advised the Obama campaign on the issue, said Mr. Obama would move to “return the law to what it was before the current administration,” in other words barring the consideration of religion in hiring decisions for such programs that receive federal financing.
“I don’t think there’s anything too controversial about that,” said. “Any religious organization that does not want to comply with that requirement simply doesn’t have to take the money.”
I'm opposed to faith-based programs for a lot of reasons. I don't want the government doing this at all, and even if I could trust a Democratic administration carrying it out I wouldn't want it set up for the next Republican to come in and allow fundamentalists to push an agenda. On these matters I defer to Rev. Barry Lynn, who comes on the show often, and is quoted in the article:
But the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, criticized Mr. Obama’s support of a program that Mr. Lynn said had undermined civil liberties and civil rights. “I am disappointed that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration,” Mr. Lynn said. “It ought to be shut down, not continued.”
All of that said, it does appear Obama's plan, as stated above, would bring things back to what they were prior to Bush. And if it's angering the Christian right it can't be all bad. He knows he won't get the hard-core, but he's perhaps looking at the poll numbers showing McCain's support among evangelicals down quite a bit from Bush's and thinks he can grab at least a few of them with this kind of rhetoric. Just giving some perspective here.
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