JohnnyBz00LS
Dedicated LVC Member
Posted on Mon, Feb. 28, 2005
Bush team fuels faith-based frustration
Column by Sylvia Smith
Washington editor
There was a lot of harrumphing within the House Education Committee last week, as Republicans accused Democrats of being "deeply strident" because they dared ask why anyone would think it's acceptable for tax dollars to be used to discriminate against job-seekers on the basis of their religion.
The issue was a bill that would make some modifications to legislation that provides job training to unemployed people. Among the proposed changes: Republicans wanted to allow faith-based groups that receive grants under the legislation to be able to be picky about whom they hire. Not picky about whether the applicant is well-qualified, but whether the job-seeker is of the same religion as the faith-based group or shares the same opinions about what is moral and what is not.
Before you wonder why anyone would question the utter reasonableness of a Lutheran church insisting that its pastor be Lutheran, consider this: The jobs we're talking about aren't in any way related to the faith-based groups' practice of religion. The jobs are the staff for the job-training programs that the faith-based groups get federal tax dollars to operate.
Presumably, one can teach people job skills without discussing whether the virgin birth really happened, whether the death penalty is immoral, whether Jesus is God or just holy, whether all abortions are a sin, whether creationism should be taught in schools or any of the other issues that the religions of the world have firm (and conflicting) opinions on.
But when Democrats asked these logical questions, Republicans were indignant. That kind of questioning, they said, was offensive to religion. They insisted that it would make churches and other faith-based groups compromise their religious liberties if we required their job-training programs to observe the same non-discriminatory hiring practices that other employers must live by.
"If you want churches to participate," Rep. Mark Souder said, "you can't continue to insult them by implying they can't help the poor and have faith."
He went on: "The core of this - and this is where we're headed if we're not careful - is does the Catholic Church have the right to have male priests?"
Of course it does. The Catholic Church can have an all-male priesthood because our country's 40-year-old civil rights law exempts religious organizations. But that does not mean - nor should it mean - that when a Catholic Church accepts the tax dollars of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Protestants and non-believers to run a job-training program that it should be allowed to reject all female applicants for the staff positions. If that church felt so strongly that women should never be in leadership roles, including in front of a job-training class, then it could pay for the program with its own money, not mine or yours.
Souder and the other Republicans on the committee are smart folks. So their insistence that applying the civil rights rules to non-religious programs operated by faith-based groups with tax dollars somehow undermines religion rang hollow.
Maybe the object of their frustration was not the Democrats (who were raising perfectly logical questions) but the fellow at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe it's President Bush who has disappointed them. Maybe they share the view of a former White House official who wrote one of the most anguished essays I have ever read.
David Kuo, for three years deeply involved in Bush's Faith-Based Initiative, left the White House in disappointment and waited a year before going public with his distress about the emptiness of Bush's pledges.
"Sadly," Kuo wrote in an essay on Beliefnet.com, "four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. The Compassion Capital Fund has received a cumulative total of $100 million during the past four years. And new programs including those for children of prisoners, at-risk youth, and prisoners re-entering society have received a little more than $500 million over four years-or approximately $6.3 billion less than the promised $6.8 billion.
"Unfortunately, sometimes even the grandly-announced `new' programs aren't what they appear. Nowhere is this clearer than in the recently-announced `gang prevention initiative' totaling $50 million a year for three years. The obvious inference is that the money is new spending on an important initiative. Not quite. The money is being taken out of the already meager $100 million request for the Compassion Capital Fund. If granted, it would actually mean a $5 million reduction in the fund from last year."
To my mind, the most damning part if Kuo's essay is his description of how the White House didn't lift a finger to get the charitable-giving tax incentives in the tax-cut bill.
(The idea of allowing non-itemizers to get a tax break for donations they make to charities was something candidate Bush said he would push. That was a thrill for Souder to hear during the 2000 campaign because the charitable-giving bill was one of his top two priorities as a newly elected congressman.)
But Kuo described the reality of the White House commitment this way:
"Not only were the tax items dropped from the 2001 tax relief bill, they were also ignored on numerous occasions when they could have been implemented. In December 2001, for instance, Sen. Daschle approached the Domestic Policy Council with an offer to pass a charity relief bill that contained many of the president's campaign tax incentive policies plus new money for the widely popular and faith-based-friendly Social Services Block Grant. The White House legislative affairs office rolled their eyes while others on senior staff yawned. We had to leave the offer on the table."
Kuo's discouragement over the Bush administration's lack of true commitment to one of the most supportable - and potentially powerful - aspects of the faith-based initiative surely is shared by those Republicans who thought America would be a better place if faith-based charities had more money to house the poor, feed the hungry, care for the sick, teach the illiterate, clothe the naked.
So maybe their frustration at the hearing last week was a bit misplaced. As was their defensiveness over a policy of allowing groups to discriminate on the basis of religion using tax dollars and in programs that have nothing to do with a particular religion.
PUBLISHED: SUNDAY, FEB. 20, 2005
Bush team fuels faith-based frustration
Column by Sylvia Smith
Washington editor
There was a lot of harrumphing within the House Education Committee last week, as Republicans accused Democrats of being "deeply strident" because they dared ask why anyone would think it's acceptable for tax dollars to be used to discriminate against job-seekers on the basis of their religion.
The issue was a bill that would make some modifications to legislation that provides job training to unemployed people. Among the proposed changes: Republicans wanted to allow faith-based groups that receive grants under the legislation to be able to be picky about whom they hire. Not picky about whether the applicant is well-qualified, but whether the job-seeker is of the same religion as the faith-based group or shares the same opinions about what is moral and what is not.
Before you wonder why anyone would question the utter reasonableness of a Lutheran church insisting that its pastor be Lutheran, consider this: The jobs we're talking about aren't in any way related to the faith-based groups' practice of religion. The jobs are the staff for the job-training programs that the faith-based groups get federal tax dollars to operate.
Presumably, one can teach people job skills without discussing whether the virgin birth really happened, whether the death penalty is immoral, whether Jesus is God or just holy, whether all abortions are a sin, whether creationism should be taught in schools or any of the other issues that the religions of the world have firm (and conflicting) opinions on.
But when Democrats asked these logical questions, Republicans were indignant. That kind of questioning, they said, was offensive to religion. They insisted that it would make churches and other faith-based groups compromise their religious liberties if we required their job-training programs to observe the same non-discriminatory hiring practices that other employers must live by.
"If you want churches to participate," Rep. Mark Souder said, "you can't continue to insult them by implying they can't help the poor and have faith."
He went on: "The core of this - and this is where we're headed if we're not careful - is does the Catholic Church have the right to have male priests?"
Of course it does. The Catholic Church can have an all-male priesthood because our country's 40-year-old civil rights law exempts religious organizations. But that does not mean - nor should it mean - that when a Catholic Church accepts the tax dollars of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Protestants and non-believers to run a job-training program that it should be allowed to reject all female applicants for the staff positions. If that church felt so strongly that women should never be in leadership roles, including in front of a job-training class, then it could pay for the program with its own money, not mine or yours.
Souder and the other Republicans on the committee are smart folks. So their insistence that applying the civil rights rules to non-religious programs operated by faith-based groups with tax dollars somehow undermines religion rang hollow.
Maybe the object of their frustration was not the Democrats (who were raising perfectly logical questions) but the fellow at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe it's President Bush who has disappointed them. Maybe they share the view of a former White House official who wrote one of the most anguished essays I have ever read.
David Kuo, for three years deeply involved in Bush's Faith-Based Initiative, left the White House in disappointment and waited a year before going public with his distress about the emptiness of Bush's pledges.
"Sadly," Kuo wrote in an essay on Beliefnet.com, "four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. The Compassion Capital Fund has received a cumulative total of $100 million during the past four years. And new programs including those for children of prisoners, at-risk youth, and prisoners re-entering society have received a little more than $500 million over four years-or approximately $6.3 billion less than the promised $6.8 billion.
"Unfortunately, sometimes even the grandly-announced `new' programs aren't what they appear. Nowhere is this clearer than in the recently-announced `gang prevention initiative' totaling $50 million a year for three years. The obvious inference is that the money is new spending on an important initiative. Not quite. The money is being taken out of the already meager $100 million request for the Compassion Capital Fund. If granted, it would actually mean a $5 million reduction in the fund from last year."
To my mind, the most damning part if Kuo's essay is his description of how the White House didn't lift a finger to get the charitable-giving tax incentives in the tax-cut bill.
(The idea of allowing non-itemizers to get a tax break for donations they make to charities was something candidate Bush said he would push. That was a thrill for Souder to hear during the 2000 campaign because the charitable-giving bill was one of his top two priorities as a newly elected congressman.)
But Kuo described the reality of the White House commitment this way:
"Not only were the tax items dropped from the 2001 tax relief bill, they were also ignored on numerous occasions when they could have been implemented. In December 2001, for instance, Sen. Daschle approached the Domestic Policy Council with an offer to pass a charity relief bill that contained many of the president's campaign tax incentive policies plus new money for the widely popular and faith-based-friendly Social Services Block Grant. The White House legislative affairs office rolled their eyes while others on senior staff yawned. We had to leave the offer on the table."
Kuo's discouragement over the Bush administration's lack of true commitment to one of the most supportable - and potentially powerful - aspects of the faith-based initiative surely is shared by those Republicans who thought America would be a better place if faith-based charities had more money to house the poor, feed the hungry, care for the sick, teach the illiterate, clothe the naked.
So maybe their frustration at the hearing last week was a bit misplaced. As was their defensiveness over a policy of allowing groups to discriminate on the basis of religion using tax dollars and in programs that have nothing to do with a particular religion.
PUBLISHED: SUNDAY, FEB. 20, 2005
