NPR is reporting that the President is increasing funding for his faith-based initiative. The program funds religious groups to provide basic social services and has been criticized because it violates the seperation of church and state. For example, the Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia received a $1mil grant after its pastor violated the church's tax exempt 501(c)(3) status in 2000 by endorsing President Bush and has since hosted the President for speeches and organized rallies to support his neo-antidisestablishmentarian justices committed to the floccinaucinihilipilification of the First Ammendment.*
*I saw the opportunity to use the two longest words in the English language in the same sentence and seized it!
In defense of his program, Bush said this in 2001:
Religious liberty is more than the right to believe in God's love. It is the right to be an instrument of God's love. Such work is beyond the reach of government and beyond the role of government. AP
That sounds nice until one considers that the "right to be an instrument of God's love" includes for President Bush federal funding of religious activities. To be clear, the recipients of these grants do not limit their activities to the secular aspects of providing basic social services. In most of these religious traditions, acting as an "instrument of God's love" includes acting to win converts. So Bush is arguing that religious groups have a right to receive public funds to evangelize and convert those that might not share their views. Moreover, the President argues that these religious groups should be the sole providers of social services, since providing basic social services is "beyond the reach of government." The policy amounts to creating a forced choice.
That forced choice is not just a problem in theory. In Michigan, the ACLU has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a man who was forced to choose between a drug rehab program that called his Catholic faith "witchcraft" seeked to coerce him into converting to Pentacostalism. Programs like Christian Outreach use social services as a convenient cover to get government sanction and support for religious bigotry.
The faith-based initiative is symbolic of a deeper ideological bias of conservatives. For all their talk of patriotism, they really despise the government. They don't see government as an effective instrument for helping people. Government to them is a mere tool for distributing money as they see fit, whether it's to one of Jack Abramoff's clients, to some crony contractor in Iraq or to a church that has endorsed the President. Meanwhile, agencies like FEMA are neglected and mismanaged because they don't ask the questions it takes to be an effective leader.
And so all of this is done on a "faith-based" basis. You can bet that Bush isn't asking the questions about whether the programs being funded are effective. That's a matter of faith. You wind up with the borrow and spend budgets that we've had over the past five years, where you cut taxes and throw around money and just have faith that it will all work out. Government can effectively provide social services, but we need representatives that believe in competent governance and will make government work better on the basis of evidence-based initiatives.
Crossposted