Obama's Ongoing Faith-Based Fandango

The New York Times opined as follows today (from here)…

President Obama promised in his campaign to preserve President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative aimed at helping social service programs sponsored by religious organizations win federal grants and contracts. He also promised a vitally important change: groups receiving federal money would no longer be allowed to hire employees on the basis of their religion.

The idea was to prevent discrimination and preserve the boundary between church and state. But Mr. Obama has not made good on the promise. His February executive order revamping the White House office for religion-based and neighborhood programs left untouched a 2002 presidential directive authorizing religious-oriented programs that receive federal financing to hire and fire on religious grounds.

Also left untouched was a constitutionally suspect 2007 memo concluding that the government cannot order religious groups not to discriminate as a condition of federal financing — even in programs like Head Start, where religious discrimination is outlawed. The memo, based on a far-fetched interpretation of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. That is the same outfit that wrote the memos authorizing torture.

And by the way, as noted here, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed because of what was determined to be government interference in Native American religious practices, though that of course has now morphed over time into ostensibly protecting all religious practices, overturning laws if "religious exercise is substantially burdened" by them, as Wikipedia tells us (yes, I think that’s a shaky-at-best legal precedent also).

Also, the Times and other news outlets have voiced disappointment in the past over Obama’s failure to end the odious Bushco practice of religious discrimination in hiring decisions that involve federal funding (this editorial from February is very similar to what the Times tells us today, for good reason).

With all of this in mind, I thought the blogger Firefly asked some good questions here in July ’08 about the constitutional clash with the whole concept of faith-based initiatives (which, to my mind, have largely gone unaddressed – Question #3 pertains to funding of these initiatives, which I posted about here a couple of months ago).

Still, though, I believe the faith-based initiatives concept has some promise; as this St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial notes, under Obama, there will be no new funding (which is pretty much par for the proverbial course with this; even before the bottom fell out of our economy, Dubya, as part of his ongoing bait-and-switch with these people, refused to fund them in accordance with his promises). Also, I believe there will be more inclusion given some of the president’s outreach gestures such as this and this.

And this tells us that the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives (and Neighborhood Partnerships, I musn't forget) under Obama is headed by Josh DuBois, who originally became active in politics in reaction to the slaying of Amadou Diallo in New York City (DuBois earned a master's degree in public affairs in 2005; the Wikipedia article also tells us that he worked as an aide to Representative Rush D. Holt, Jr., and was a fellow in the office of Representative Charles B. Rangel).

I was curious to find out if there were any further developments on this matter in light of today’s Times editorial as well as those of prior news organizations and web sites, but I was unable to locate a link to the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives from the White House web site (strange, since there are links to just about everything else).

Yes, I get the whole “No Drama Obama” thing, and putting off action on so-called “values” issues such as this in favor of what you could arguably consider more tangible tasks such as health care reform and climate legislation, to say nothing of the Afghan war, is basically good politics (what good is it to end up alienating core constituencies somehow when pursuing larger objectives?).

However, Mr. President, I should tell you that it is also a lousy model for governance. As with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a statement from your office in support doing the decent thing (and thus ending discriminatory hiring practices from outfits that take taxpayer funds for what, to my mind, are questionable reasons) would energize part of your constituency and thus generate exponential results.

And at long last, “change” would be something a whole lot more substantial than merely a logo on a T-shirt.