NEW YORK – I hate to say it, but I told you so.
I warned you that President Bush’s “faith-based charity” initiative was a fraud and fraught with danger for churches and the republic in general.
Now there’s confirmation of my worst fears.
President Bush last week abruptly ended consideration of a regulation that would have allowed religious charities, which accept federal tax dollars, to exempt themselves from state and local laws requiring employers to hire sexual deviates.
Of course, that’s not the way the story was spun by the Washington Post. According to the Post, the White House abruptly ended its consideration of a regulation “that would have allowed religious charities to discriminate against gays.”
The way I phrased it is accurate. The way the Post phrased it is deceptive.
The issue of so-called “non-discrimination” laws based on sexual orientation extends well beyond whether employers are forced to hire homosexuals or not. For instance, if a male prospective employee comes to a sales job interview wearing a dress, the employer could well be in danger of violating discrimination laws. That should be of concern to every single employer – not just religious institutions or businesses operating on common-sense principles of faith and tradition.
This decision – or non-decision – by the Bush administration is so typical of what we’ve seen from the White House in its first year. It is politically self-conscious. It is allowing its political opponents – its enemies – to shape public policy. It is bending and compromising when it should be resolute. This is why you can’t trust anything it says.
And this is why churches must not be seduced by the promise of taxpayer money with hardly any strings attached. It just isn’t real.
It doesn’t happen. There are always strings attached – lots of them.
The issue of exemptions came up when the Salvation Army, the nation’s largest charity – and perhaps its most effective – requested the waiver to protect itself and other religious charities from these hideous anti-discrimination laws.
But then the Democrats started attacking. They threatened to kill the whole “faith-based” program if such an exemption were allowed. Any possible deal was off. That’s how easy it was.
Some of you will say: “Well, Farah, isn’t something better than nothing? What could Bush have done? If he didn’t have enough support to get the program approved by Congress, maybe this was his only option?”
To which I say: “It’s better to do the right thing for the right reasons and lose a legislative battle than to get terminally defective legislation through Congress.”
This little compromise illustrates the bigger problem with Bush’s faith-based initiative. He’s right to recognize that religious charities are far more effective in dealing with social ills than is the government. But he’s wrong to contaminate these effective programs with the very things certain to destroy them – government funding, amoral rules, regulations, red tape, valueless directives.
People who believe this can work clearly have far more faith in government than they do in God.
I hope and trust that institutions such as the Salvation Army flat-out refuse to be a part of such a program. It’s as close as you can get to creating a state church in America when the government has this kind of control over religious institutions. I can’t believe so many well-intended but misguided churches and ministries are going along with the program.
It’s a trap – pure and simple.
With or without the exemptions, the faith-based initiative is a loser. It justifies and continues immoral policies of forced wealth transfers. And such policies can never end in compassionate and moral results. The plan is as unconstitutional as any other central planning-style anti-poverty program devised by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon or Franklin Roosevelt.
In announcing his plan for the program earlier this year, Bush said: “Government will never be replaced by charities and community groups. Yet when we see social needs in America, my administration will look first to faith-based programs. … We will not discriminate against them.”
Well, guess what? He just did discriminate against them. Churches that actually believe in something – such as the standards of the Bible – consider their accountability to God as a higher calling than their homage to Caesar.
This program hasn’t even gotten out of Congress yet, and already promises are being broken. Just imagine where it will be some day in the distant future – with another president, another Congress and fading memories of the original intent.
Earlier column:
