Obama the Theocrat

Am I jumping the gun here? Not much. The Boston Globe is reporting that Obama is not only planning to put Bush's controversial "faith-based programs" back into effect, he's going to expand them.

Reaching out to religious voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called for expanding President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and -- in a move sure to cause controversy -- supported some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama unveiled his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday at Eastside Community Ministry, which provides food, clothes, youth ministry and other services.

"The challenges we face today ... are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama said.

You pathetic moron. The "challenges we face today" are as big as they are because for 30 years conservative US govts have been getting out of the charity business. We've been cutting people off food stamps, cutting WIC, cutting health care, cutting subsidized housing, cutting cutting cutting every program that made up LBJ's safety net, every program that helped a low-income rather than a rich or corporate population. And you wanna do what to fix that? Turn it over to the churches? Well, not entirely. Not at first.

While Obama would expand Bush's efforts to give religious charities more equal footing when getting federal funding, he also would tweak what he would call the President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in ways that divert from Bush's approach.

He would increase spending on social services, starting with a $500 million-a-year program to keep 1 million poor children up to speed on their studies over the summers. He would increase training for charities applying for funding and make it a grass-roots effort. He would elevate the program to be "a critical part of my administration," a reference to criticism that Bush paid barely more than lip service to his effort.

And just why does he think this would be effective?

Obama also chose a different emphasis for why religious charities are an important answer to solving poverty and other social problems: because they better know the people who are hurting, instead of Bush's argument that religion itself is a transforming power the government must not be afraid to harness.

Yeah. Right.

Well, I'm down here in the South, Georgia at the moment, where churches have taken over the business of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked almost entirely. Georgia provides a minimum of food stamps and housing vouchers, the towns and cities (with the seeming exception of Atlanta) do ZIPPO NADA BUPKISS. Savannah has a large homeless population that numbers in the thousands (and that's a conservative estimate; some say tens of thousands) and doesn't sponsor a single food bank, soup kitchen, clothing outlet, or shelter. It is all done by church volunteers. The result?

You can eat twice a day - at 11am and then at 4 pm. That's twice in 5 hrs and then NOTHING until the next morning, 19 hrs a day without food because it's hard to get volunteers before those hours. You have to pay people to get up at 4am to serve breakfast at 6. Oh, and that's just Mon thru Fri because, you know, people don't get hungry on the weekends. There's a Good Samaritan, unaffiliated with any church or govt agency so far as I know, who brings hot dogs to a park at 9am every Sat morning and gives them away. For some, that's the only meal they'll get.

That's fairly standard everywhere I've been in the South except Fayetteville, where a govt-paid soup kitchen runs 7 days/wk and provides 3 meals/day. That's the pattern we can expect. Hey, BO, maybe you ought to be changing that script a little, as in "THE CHALLENGES WE FACE TODAY ARE TOO BIG FOR CHURCHES TO SOLVE ALONE." But hey, a Democratic instead of Republican message is going to be a stretch for you since you've forgotten (if you ever knew) who Democrats used to be pre-DLC.

So forget the fact that you'd be - yet again - subverting the Constitution and concentrate on the simple fact that faith-based charity doesn't work.

After your FISA support, I don't expect you to defend the Constitutional separation of church and state - after all, you're a Republican running to please the religious right. But you ought to understand that from down here, I KNOW that these churches do as little as possible and ONLY to get you in the door in order to force their particular brand of religion down your throat. People in trouble are easy targets and captive audiences. We are forced to sit through Xtian prayer services before we're given food and if we tell them we're not Xtians and want to skip the service part, we are refused food or worse - prayed over and told if we don't convert we're evil and we're going to hell.

This is what you want to support with govt money. Outright proselytizing, coercive and hamfisted. This is who you want to run charities that are supposed to help people. You want to hand them a whole new set of victims?

Any chance you'll rethink the whole stupid, right-wing fantasy and reject it? No, I suppose not.