Another (lengthy) opinion on Obama's funding of faith-based programs. The first part discusses how Bush's program got written into laws (and just not one law, but lots of favoritism snuck into lots of different laws), and then a peek into a federal bureaucracy that gave out the grants. An example of the latter is the story of a woman who scored the applications for worthiness. "'But,' she said with a giggle, 'when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing. I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero.'"
What to do? Of Obama wants to keep faith-based programs, this is how he must separate church from state:
Fund organizations with religious ties (Lutheran Social Services) but not pervasively religious groups, such as actual churches.
Taxpayer money does not fund proselytizing nor discrimination in who is served or hired (even so, as I mentioned in that previous post, it is still legal to discriminate against gays).
Secular alternatives are readily available and religious services must tell clients about them.
Proper firewalls between secular and sectarian parts requires a separate corporate structure to handle the government funded programs.
To put it another way.. Obama needs to go back to the rules in place before 1996.
If you don't like these rules there is always private funding. But that is harder to raise and usually comes with a lot more oversight -- donors want to know how effective you are with their money.
Of course, Bush's pals are going to fight the change in rules. And even progressive pastors have their own agendas.
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