Conscience Cause
by digby
There’s always a lot of talk among the social conservatives about how their consciences won’t allow them to have their highly moral dollars touch the highly immoral dollars of highly immoral women who seek to exercise their right to decide whether or not to procreate.
Well, I don’t want my highly immoral dollars touching these highly immoral dollars. But I don’t think anyone cares:
In the two years since the OFBNP (Office of Faith Based Neighborhood Projects) launch, church-state separation and civil liberties advocates, acting individually and through the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) have repeatedly pushed Obama to stop funding organizations with discriminatory hiring practices, as well as ending the practice known as direct funding, which permits taxpayer money to flow directly to houses of worship, rather than requiring them to establish a separate nonprofit entity. Instead, on the hiring discrimination issue, Obama said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would review instances of alleged discrimination on a “case-by-case basis,” and has merely encouraged recipients to set up separate nonprofits. Using federal dollars to hire applicants chosen according to discriminatory practices is “a blatant violation of fairness and religious liberty, and the president knows this,” said Sean Faircloth, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, also a CARD member. In addition, “If religious organizations wish to help their community with US taxpayer dollars, we believe it’s only right that they be required to create a separate, non-religious entity for that purpose — one that would be open to government oversight…. Churches and other religious groups are free to do what they want with their own money, but once they receive federal funds, they should be required to operate by the same laws as any other charity.”
To be sure, the president did sign an executive order saying that they should not discriminate. But the implementation of this leaves quite a bit to be desired:
Through a spokes person, DuBois said that each agency would have its own process, and that this process was independent from the OFBNP. At the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as one example, the Administration on Children and Families (ACF) administers the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which includes grant recipients with explicitly faith-based — and often sectarian Christian — mission statements and approaches. According to the Initiative’s website, one Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grant recipient, Skillful Couples Vibrant Marriages, provides services “that transform families into ones that are spiritually alive: each person has a growing, personal relationship with Jesus Christ that impacts every aspect of their lives.” When asked about how the ACF is complying, or will comply with the executive order, a representative from HHS replied by e-mail, “As part of the executive order issued by the president, a working group was established to ensure uniform implementation across the federal government…
The question remains — how long is this all going to take? Meanwhile, all these organizations are providing services without the regulations in place. What’s more, while the executive order requires agencies to post a list of entities that “receive federal financial assistance for provision of social service programs,” it doesn’t require them to designate which recipients are faith-based groups. As a result, the taxpayer money flowing to religious groups remains, as it was during the Bush administration, difficult to track.
I have a feeling that the President will not get one vote he wouldn’t have gotten if he’d stopped this practice altogether. There’s no margin in funding the right’s electoral infrastructure, which is what this is. And the merits of these programs are dubious at best. With everyone constantly braying about the deficit and the need to slash programs, I vote to put this one on the table.
But it will go on despite the fact that it offends people like me who think that my tax dollars should not be spent on religious teaching or that people should not have to accept religious doctrine in return for social services. That’s just a given. In America morality is what the puritans and the scolds decide it is. Always has been.
Correction: the Executive Order does not deal with hiring discrimination(it deals with proselytizing and monitoring and accountability)which makes critics of the program even more anxious. There’s simply nothing being done to prevent this at all.
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