The Times' editors today demand that, "Discrimination by faith-based grantees should be barred."Boy are they mixed up. Religions are nearly always tribal and preferential. They are clubs with members.
How come the editors of the Times don't get that?
Can you really give money to a religious group and tell them not to "discriminate"?
We have been there and we did that exercise back in the 60's. Yeshiva University and many other parochial schools had to decide back then if it could take the "Federal Money" that demanded non-discrimination.
The resulting Talmudic/Byzantine/convoluted/labyrinthine organizational framework that came out of that era has been a moral disaster.
It made this happen. YU leaders said to their donors we are a religious school for Jews. Give us your money. And to Washington they said we don't discriminate. Give us your money.
What does the Times want from religious organizations? Does the Times want to perpetuate more of the two-faced corruption of ethics and morals of the past?
Yes we know. The question goes back really to Obama who is keeping the Faith Based Initiatives alive and back to Bush who first set up shop in that swamp.
The title of the editorial says it all: "Faith-Based Fudging."
Our view is that the boundary between democracy and religion should never have been fudged in the first place.
There is no way for a religion to maintain its mission and integrity and for it to fulfill Obama's directive, to wit,
Speaking last July in Ohio, Mr. Obama set forth his “basic principles” for assuring constitutional balance. “First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use the grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of religion,” he said. “Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs.”Enforcement of these goals is impossible by definition. We all know that. The current wink and nod approach to making believe that it is not impossible is now just given a new name. It is called a "process of case-by-case review."
Constitutional lawyers may say this makes the funding program kosher.
The editorial concludes with a warning, "The case-by-case review seems destined to confuse as much as enlighten. And it is hardly the clear commitment to proper employment practices Mr. Obama voiced as a candidate, and the Constitution requires."
This warning is not enough.
The Times ought to have said clearly that the program is flawed at its essence and destructive to our nation's social fabric.
To keep these initiatives going means that we surely are instructing our purported moral leaders in their respective faith communities to misrepresent the essence of their being so they can qualify for Federal Funding. Or should we say, Federal Fudging?
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