Yesterday when I watched KO, I found myself disturbed both by Obama's announcement that he intended to continue the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, and by KO's reaction to it. Talk about a soup of conflicting feelings. Then I started thinking. (Yeah, sometimes I actually do that.)
During the 2004 election, I was really pissed. Yeah, I know, you were too, most likely. But one of the things that had really grabbed me was the right's hijacking of the Bible. Who, I asked myself, where they to stand on New Testament principles when they'd started an unprincipled war (Both Protestant and Catholic churches at the national and international levels had risen up to declare the war "unjust" under Just War Theory), and when their idea of compassionate conservatism seemed to be making the poor poorer and doing less than ever for helping the needy, the sick, and oh-by-the-way-the-rest-of-the-world?
I stomped around for days arguing that the Dems had more Christian principles in our "liberal" agenda, so why the hell were we so afraid to wave the Bible and say, "Hey, Jesus told us to feed the poor, visit the sick, and as you do unto the least of these, so you do unto me?"
I wondered why the Bible was Democratic poison.
Before you jump all over me about this, let me say I firmly believe in a strong wall of separation between Church and State. I cherish that wall. I will fight and die to preserve that wall. But the thing is, that wall is about law, and making laws, and not about talking about moral principles even when they are couched in terms of the Bible, Jesus, Moses or Mohammed.
So I felt the teachings I held dearest had been hijacked by people who were using them against us, not for us, and I voiced the opinion that the Dems needed to take back the Bible, wall of separation notwithstanding.
When I heard about Obama's plan to keep faith-based initiatives, my first reaction was "Oh-my-God-no." That wall, I thought. You can't lower that wall any farther. And KO seemed to be trying to get someone to say this was a bad thing, too.
But then I sat up. Hey, I thought, Obama's not afraid to take back the Bible. Didn't I want to see that?
And what's more, I got to thinking about how the homeless, the hungry and the sick without insurance get help in my metropolitan area and I realized something even more important: All that help comes from area churches and synagogues and mosques. We don't have a public program for helping these people. We have Metropolitan Ministries, an organization created by local churches of every stripe which accepts donations from local churches and people. We have the Salvation Army, a Christian group if ever there was one. We have the St. Vincent de Paul Society, working at the more immediate needs Metropolitan Ministries can't handle quickly enough, or because of their limitations.
What do we get from our city and county governments? Police telling the homeless to move on, police telling those who try to feed the poor that they'll be arrested if they keep doing it. (A prime example: a group of university students had banded together to feed the homeless in a park near the school. Every midday they'd go over there with food and dole it out. The cops told the students to stop, that if they came again to hand out food they'd be arrested.)
So yeah, if Obama wants to funnel my tax dollars to these organizations, with the proviso that they can't discriminate in hiring, and they can't proselytize, I'm all for it. Because almost nobody else is taking care of these hungry and homeless millions. Most of us seem to want just not to see them, hence the police actions to drive them away, even off property owned by charities where the charities have set up tent cities for them. (Yeah, that happened here, too.)
Is that taking down the wall between church and state? No, it's not. You can still practice your brand however you want or don't want. What this will do is take down the wall between the haves and have-nots by using volunteer organizations that are already struggling to do the good work. It will take advantage of mechanisms already in place, and it won't create a huge federal bureaucracy to gobble up more dollars than are actually spent to help people.
Americans are a generous people, and a religious people, for the most part. Putting those morals and precepts into right action will be good for the country.
So yay to Obama for being willing to take back the Bible, and to use those moral principles as a guide. It's time to remember Jesus was a radical liberal, not a conservative in a suit.