Obama: Faith Erased Initiative

Joe Knippenberg gives a thoughtful take on Barack Obama's approach to so-called "faith based initiatives," i.e., the government using churches as a means to deliver social services. 

But the supposedly post-partisan Obama is singing from the hymnbook assembled by President Bush’s Democratic opponents, ignoring the weight of judicial precedent, not to mention any sort of nuance, in favor of a simplistic slogan. He ignores and indeed misrepresents the past to promote a fantastic (as in fantasy) constitutional vision whose roots are in an extremely simplistic and secularist reading of the First Amendment.

Notice the language Obama uses: taking religion into account when hiring is discrimination, which in our egalitarian culture is presumptively wrong.  But is it really discrimination when a religious organization asks that its employees support its mission or affirm its statement of faith? I’d call that an exercise of religious freedom, which is what a unanimous Supreme Court held in the 1987 case Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos.

Read the while thing.