One Debate We All Lose

Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has announced that not only is he going to continue one of Bush’s most constitutionally questionable policies, the faith-based initiative, but he is actually going to expand the program. In fact, the New York Times reports that if Obama is elected, he “would consider elevating the director of his Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to a cabinet-level post.”

Is this the sort of “change” that we can expect from an Obama presidency? I am not naïve enough to expect a candidate to agree with me on every policy position, but this is one of the more offensive initiatives that Bush has brought us. Despite the arguments that church-based organizations are often able to provide services better and/or cheaper than their secular counterparts, the government should not be giving money to them. Bush’s faith-based initiative represents a crack in the wall separating church and state; as such it should be filled, not expanded. I feel that Obama is really letting me down on this one.

One silver lining of the Obama plan is that he has pledged to rescind Bush’s executive order that allows the church-based organizations receiving tax dollars to discriminate in their hiring and firing based upon a person’s religious beliefs. Predictably, some religious groups are out of their minds over this.

“If you can’t hire people within your faith community, then you’ve lost the distinctive that is the reason why faith-based programs exist in the first place,” said Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Well, damn. And here I thought the reason the faith-based programs existed was to help people in need. Shows what I know.

For his part, Straight-talk McCain chimed in on the matter as well.

A McCain campaign spokesman, Brian Rogers, said Mr. McCain “disagrees with Senator Obama that hiring at faith-based groups should be subject to government oversight.”

So McCain believes that not hiring someone because of their religious beliefs is okay. Do we really need laws protecting people from discriminatory hiring practices? If McCain is elected, maybe we can get rid of them and find out. You know, free market blah blah blah.

So who wins the great faith-based initiative debate? Nobody. The religious nuts come off as religious nuts; McCain comes off as clueless once more; and Obama shows himself to be a sellout. The real losers, though, are the American citizens. The separation of church and state is a cornerstone of our democracy, and it seems that no matter who we put in office, that separation will be a little narrower as a result.
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