No faith-based federal aid (at all)

Susan Jacoby goes right to the core of the faith-based federal aid debate:

To require any religious institution to hire people who do not agree with and represent its principles is absurd. That is why the government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization, whatever its hiring practices.
This is not only my position as a secular civil libertarian. It is also the position of honest religious leaders, like the Rev. Albert H. Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. For Mohler, it is unthinkable that Baptists should compromise their religious principles--such as their mission to proselytize for Christianity--in order to receive federal grants. Therefore, understandably enough, he opposes the acceptance of government aid by churches. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints has taken the same position.

At issue is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed in 1993 and designed to protect religious liberty, not countenance discrimination.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been asked to reverse the “constitutionally questionable” June 2007, Bush administration memo which held that RFRA could exempt certain religious organizations from federal anti-discrimination provisions.

Not enough, Jacoby says, and not a chance more than that will be done. Ever.

God's dream and the health-care debate

British Baptist journalist Jonathan Langley writes for the Associated Baptist Press that:

... in a week when Americans opposed to a large role for government in health-care reform have been attacking the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, mistaking American rights for “Christian rights” highlights a tendency in some American Christian circles to mistake the United States for the Kingdom of God.

He goes from that right to the heart of the objection some have to health reform. We Americans tend to believe one and all that God is on our side. Thus anything we feel is somehow un-American must be evil:

This, I think, helps explain why there have been such vehement denunciations of the British health-care system in America in recent days. Socialism, to those still brainwashed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's legacy, is “un-American.” Why? Because, as an old colleague returning from a time in Chicago explained to me last week, the American dream is to work for yourself and your own betterment. And any attempt to make you pay even a little for someone else's health care is a violation of that dream.

Yet as Christians, he writes, "Our duty is to remember that the God Jesus Christ proclaims requires his children to give freely, love selflessly and sacrifice readily for the well-being of others."

Driven by that faith-based logic he concludes:

Let's pray that our American brothers and sisters can free themselves of any heresies that would see them deny the less fortunate among them health care for the sake of any false dream.

James Madison on where the 'wall of separation' applies to faith-based initiatives

Today is the anniversary of President James Madison 1811 veto of "An act incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church in the town of Alexandria, in the District of Columbia."

Rob Boston reminds us of Madison's words:

“[T]he bill,” he wrote, “exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions, and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.’”
. . .
“[T]he bill vests in the said incorporated church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same, an authority which, being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity, would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

Boston argues that Madison would have similarly resisted the Obama administration's current blurring of church/state lines in the faith-based initiatives.

The Anti-Defamation League is similarly concerned.

Mark Silk writes, "The [ADL] letter goes beyond the hiring issue to make it clear that additional safeguards are needed, including separation of religious and secular functions, oversight, and the assurance of secular alternatives to faith-based service provision."

Right on target, and this is the right day to remember it.

Dissatisfied religious feminists

Religious feminists are almost as unhappy the politically progressive theopolitical order as some Southern Baptist women are with their denomination's doctrine of submission.

Frances Kissling -- a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and former president of Catholics for a Free Choice -- wrote on Tuesday:

Much is made by the theo-politicians of their work across ideological differences. But this has been achieved by excluding from their ranks those religious leaders who are progressive and outspoken on gender, sexuality, and religion. It is then easy to stand side by side with Rick Warren and Joel Hunter, for they actually agree with these conservatives on sexuality and reproduction and have only minor differences on LGBT issues. Center-left theo-politicians are silent on the meaning of sexual expression outside of heterosexual marriage; they have no interest in the theological construction of a new moral and ethical standard of relationship, justice, and friendship that governs sexuality. They are silent on the morality of LGBT sexuality, limiting their support to “civil rights.” They talk about women only as victims, never as moral agents. They take on the easy religious issues—poverty and peace. They do so either out of political expedience or because they actually agree with the religious right.

Either way, they hinder rather than help the justice-seeking project of progressive religious feminists. And that it not good for religion or justice.

As a corrective, Kissling and others would like to see more than "one identifiable advocate for women’s sexual and reproductive rights" appointed to President Obama’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to counterbalance the "several anti-choice supporters."

A wish that will be at least partly granted, we suspect.

Stimulus Bill Includes Funds for Faith-Based Initiative

From Religion Clause:

Among the many items in the proposed economic stimulus bill, HR 1, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, is a provision for funding of $100 million for grants to faith-based organization through the Compassion Capital Fund [at pg. 141 of bill].

Read it all here.