Obama and ‘faith-based’ initiatives

First, there was this awful news about Obama’s support of “faith-based programs”:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and — in a move sure to cause controversy — support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Gak. If that were true, he’d be at some risk of losing my vote, and would definitely be on the road to losing my campaign support. That was Fox News, though, so I held off until I heard more…although reporting that Obama supported an agenda favored by the religious right seemed unlikely from that source, unless they also announced he was only going to fund Islamic programs (Oops, did I just start another rumor?).

Next, there was some fast damage control: that early report was wrong, and here’s what Obama really said.

Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea — so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that 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 their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work.

That’s better. Until you think about it. He’s still proposing an expansion of Bush’s faith-based initiatives — he’s going to be handing out billions of dollars to religious organizations. It’s nice that he’s specifically saying there will be restrictions, that the money can’t be used in programs that discriminate, and it must be for secular purposes, but he’s still propping up a religious middleman between government aid and the people, and that’s a tool that will be used to proselytize indirectly, even if they don’t simply flout the rules. This is a bad idea.

I’m going to take the side of Americans United, which has put out a call for Obama to shut down the government’s pandering to religion with these faith-based charities.

Rather than try to correct the defects of the Bush “faith-based” initiative, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would do better to shut it down, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Obama today announced a proposal to expand faith-based funding during a speech in Zanesville, Ohio.

“I am disappointed,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “This initiative has been a failure on all counts, and it ought to be shut down, not expanded.”

However, Lynn said he was pleased to hear Obama express support for church-state separation and say that he would bar government-funded proselytism and religious discrimination in hiring when tax dollars are involved.

“It is imperative that public funds not pay for proselytizing or subsidize discrimination in hiring,” said Lynn. “Obama has promised that he will not support publicly funded proselytism or discrimination in hiring, and that’s an important commitment.”

The Bush administration has repeatedly insisted that religious charities can discriminate on religious grounds in hiring staff when running publicly funded programs.

Lynn said he is concerned that the Obama plan apparently would allow direct tax funding of houses of worship to run social service programs. That, said Lynn, raises serious issues of entanglement between religion and government.

Americans United has led opposition to the Bush faith-based initiative since it was unveiled in 2001.

The plan Obama proposes doesn’t even make sense. If religious groups have a history of altruistic support for the needy, good for them and let them continue as they have…but funneling government funds through organizations that supposedly already have “faith-based” mechanisms for raising money seems superfluous. That’s the only advantage these groups have, anyway — the ability to fleece the flock to fund their work. Being religious does not give any advantage in obtaining material outcomes.

End the faith-based initiatives. The government should only be supporting programs that work — at least, in my dreams of an efficient administration, anyway.

Theology is a deceitful strategy

Karl Giberson is interviewed about the subject of his new book, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It looks interesting, in an aggravating sort of way, and it’s on my long list of books to read and use to put dents in my wall. The interview reminds me why I detest the rarefied apologetics of sympathetic theologians as much as I do the bleatings of the purblind literalists — neither one even notices the fundamental flaws in their core of belief.

Let me be nice first. Giberson does say a number of eminently sensible things — he’s a physicist by training, he has no brief for creationism at all, he might wish Intelligent Design were true but he sees it as a betrayal of the scientific enterprise. Don’t mistake him for your corner bible thumper! Here, for instance, is a good argument well spoken:

[Read more…]

Fire the starting gun! The Darwin year begins…NOW!

It was on 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, that the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a joint reading of Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers at the Linnean Society of London (an event which they did not recognize as important at the time), which makes today analogous to the Fourth of July for the biology revolution. Celebrate! If you’ve got a some fireworks you were saving for the holiday in a few days time, set off a few early.

The Beagle Project has a summary of the significance of this day in scientific history. If you want an anchor point for the Darwin Year, this is a good candidate — let the science flow forth.

More competition!

If you’ve been wondering about the mysterious presentiments and portents at The Loom and Bad Astronomy, wonder no more: just head on over to blogs at Discover Magazine page, and lo, there they are. It looks like every print magazine in the universe is realizing that they need a stable of bloggers to provide continuous, dynamic content, and Discover has poached our very own Carl Zimmer, which is sad to say for us.

They got Phil, too, but that isn’t such a big deal. I’m sure he came cheap.

Still, this is a good thing overall — I’m all for expanding the universe of science blogging.

(via Tangled Up in Blue Guy)

There are many of us here who deserve to read this

Are you an elitist bastard? I know I am! If you’re like me, then, you’ll appreciate a whole collection of unabashedly elitist, thoroughly bastardly sneers and tirades in the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards #2. Revel in it, you smug scoundrels.

And hey, I’m helming this carnival at the end of July, so send me your broadsides. If they meet my arrogantly high standards, they might make it into the next edition. All I ask is that you take your inspiration from Lord Flashheart, and do it with a bang.

If you’re really, really good, you might also volunteer to run one yourself. They’ve got a lot of empty slots in their calendar, no doubt because supremely elitist bastards are rare and hard to come by.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Tunguska event

Except, unfortunately, what the heck it was. The Tunguska event was the mysterious explosion of unidentified origin that occured in a remote area of Siberia on 30 June 1908, flattening trees over 2000 square kilometers, but leaving no trace of a crater. Archy has put together a thorough account of what we know, including some of the speculation about the causes.

I rather liked the idea that it was a curse by the thunder god, Ogdy, mainly because “Ogdy” is such a cute name.

The Official Australian “Vent About World Youth Day” Thread

I must have a lot of Australian readers, or the few of you are really upset about this, because I’m getting a rising volume of email about World Youth Day. This is a bizarre Catholic get-together for young people — bizarre because, well, the idea of a pack of Catholic priests herding a flock of young boys and girls into one central mass sounds like the preliminaries to a feeding frenzy to me — which is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, a substantial chunk of which is being subsidized by Australian taxpayers. Isn’t it a bit peculiar that a secular government is paying for a massive membership drive for sectarian superstition? Furthermore, the Australian government is expanding police authority to restrict protests at the event, levying prohibitive fines for even trivial expressions of free speech.

All this for a goofy medieval religion that has decided that it needs to get jiggy with the young’uns to maintain its relevance.

Anyway, Australian atheists, agnostics, and secularists, you’ve got reason to be pissed off. The thread is yours.

“Mr Homosexual” would be an awesome name

At least, it beats “Mr Gay”, which sounds so frivolous. It seems the American Family Association, which you can tell from the name is yet another institution that has mistaken “patriarchy” for “family”*, was a little overzealous in their use of search and replace, and renamed an athlete named Tyson Gay briefly.

*Try it! Just mentally substitute “patriarchy” for “family” in the title of every right-wing organization that uses the term in their name, and it will suddenly make so much more sense.