A report has recently been rendered by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, which has been tracking and thoroughly reporting on what it calls a "parallel government", whose goal is to penetrate agency operations to enlist, equip, enable, empower, and expand faith-based organizations in federal social and health services.
For example, there is now a national clearinghouse out of the White House to gather all information that the churches - these are, it says, "faith-based organizations" but really they are fundamentalist churches, evangelical churches, mainly - how they can get federal money. They have developed a catalog of $50 billion worth of government programs that these organizations can get, including training seminars that show them how to do it. And they have guides for pastors as to how to deal with HIV and AIDS (without condoms of course).
Who reviews these grants after the jump
There is something called the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services. It's very important with tobacco and drugs and alcohol issues. As of now, you no longer need to be a medical professional in order to treat people. That in effect means the churches can get this money and treat people in any of these areas. That's a lot of money and a lot of non-expertise.
I want to say that I don't think that most of ordinary people who sit in the pews - are disingenuous at all. I'm not suggesting that. But I am suggesting that there is a political agenda behind this, of financing a whole constituency of leadership in the churches and people who control these programs and the intermediaries that have political ends to support this right wing, to ensure the continued political support of Republicans and the right-wing end of the Republican party, which is now the majority.
Again, in terms of abstinence education - and this, just from a purely professional point of view. This administration has tripled the amount of money going for abstinence education. So they don't talk about condoms; they talk about abstinence only as the way to prevent HIV and AIDS, which is true but it's just not real. And what's happened is that for the first time in these health education programs, more of the funds are going to faith-based groups than to secular nongovernmental organizations. This is extraordinary and for the first time they have excluded any of what we call "outcomes evaluation". Nobody has to prove that doing it this way is better than doing it some other way. Is it worse, is it better, is it safe? Now, everybody in the health field has worked for decades to get outcomes research; in every other field of health you attempt to do outcomes evaluation. They don't have to do it. So there's no accountability even in a professional sense. In addition to that, they're putting in $7 million to develop pregnancy crisis centers, which means when girls get pregnant, we tell them, "Don't think about abortion. Adopt the baby out."
And then the Rockefeller Institute couldn't find out who reviews these grants in order to approve them, so they had to go through Freedom of Information Act procedures. What they found was that the people who review the grants, unlike every other kind of health and social welfare program that has to compete for monies, they have evangelical groups reviewing the grants - not experts, not Planned Parenthood, not the Guttmacher Institute, not health education organizations that are expert in sex education and have been doing it for decades and have a wonderful reputation. It's groups like the Family Research Council, which is extreme right wing; the Christian Coalition, the True Values Association, Summit Ministries (headed by the Watergate ex-convict, Charles Colson) that are reviewing grants.
HUD is now giving a third of its grants to faith-based organizations, and in one training session for the faith-based crowd, they used the burning bush as the logo, and one of the federal trainers led the group in gospel songs. Now I love gospel songs in another setting. I don't see it in a federal training seminar. I think it's wrong for the Feds to be doing that.
So this is what's happening, but nobody knows about it. It's never been reported anywhere because you don't have easy access to this information. Similarly with US AID, the Agency for International Development. They have a program opposing human slavery, which means taking especially girls and using them as sex slaves. So these AID agency men - and there's an evangelical in charge of the anti-slavery program - are giving money to the churches so they can teach these young girls to abstain, but they don't teach them about, and they don't want to give out, condoms because they say it's promoting prostitution. And AID is consequently under-funding the secular organizations that have been working with these girls for years. On the one hand, you're weakening the secular structures and you're building up the financing of the religious structures whose strategies are simply not of this world.
Now also, more of the anti-HIV/AIDS monies, the US global program monies for addressing AIDS issues, which are huge problems, are going--most of it--to faith-based organizations, including to something called (this is a new one on me) Operation Blessings International. This is a newly formed intermediary group started by the evangelical preacher, Pat Robertson. He's also getting money from the Bush Compassion Capital Fund, which has quintupled since 2001. These are funds for capital expenses essentially for churches so they can provide social and health services; but they can also use the same buildings and facilities, computers, and so on, for their religious purposes. These intermediary groups are wonderful because Roberson has got $11 million that he can deal out to churches that he likes and there's no accountability of individual churches: they do not have to report what they do or how they do it in the way other non-profits must do.
Just a few more agencies:
The EPA now has a faith-based program. Also, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Small Business Administration, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac: together they finance practically all of the housing in the country. FHA as well. The National Credit Union, FDIC, the Social Security Administration--all have faith-based programs and are giving money out somehow to faith-based organizations. That's the point of the parallel government: unaccountable, uninformative, and unevaluated.
So that's my point: We have the institutionalization of the right-wing fundamentalists in the government.