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Presidential candidate John Kerry has a "faith-based initiative." This news was a shocker to me. Has Kerry adopted the wedge used by right-wingers to crack the wall of separation between church and state?

Both religious and secular people support that wall and have for over 200 years. Maintaining that separation frees religious organizations from government strings.

Kerry's approach is different, though, from the current "faith-based initiatives." The Democrat proposes a plan focused more on technical assistance and training for religious groups to help them obtain the federal grants available while still keeping religious activities separate and free from government control. He proposes finding ways to team government and religious groups in ways that preserve rather than weaken the U.S. Constitution's integrity.

Through all of this he proposes safeguards to ensure that public funds don't pay for building churches or for buying religion-focused teaching materials.

Most importantly, Kerry says he will recraft the current executive orders that expose churches and religious organizations to legal challenges on constitutional and civil rights issues.

One problem remains unaddressed. "Faith-based" initiatives embed a faulty assumption. They assume one group has faith and the other group lacks faith. This couldn't be further from the truth and distorts the real constitutional problem.

Even those people implied as faithless actually have faith in the consistency of nature and the laws of nature. The problem isn't in the presence or absence of faith but in the natural influence that attends any kind of funding. If a charitable group accepts public funds it cannot avoid a subtle amount of governmental control, which is clearly wrong for church-based groups.

Kerry is once again patroling dangerous borders. Rather than doing what most of us would do, reject any form of connection between church activities and government services, he explores the question of whether there exists some way to form valuable partnerships with non-governmental service agencies to achieve greater results even when the private partners are religious groups.

The loaded and inaccurate term "faith-based initiative" should be left behind. It was created by a spin machine of the neo-conservatives. The proposed partnerships should be simply public/private partnerships with specific safeguards and rules in place whenever the private partner is a religion-based group.

On the other hand, I'm not sure a need has been demonstrated to form these partnerships at all. The mission of government social programs is to create economic opportunity and increase access to freedom. Most private charitable programs have other goals that center around relieving suffering. They are related goals but very different missions.

Using public funds to assist private charities confuses these different missions and pretends the differences don't matter. Just as we shouldn't hire a private army to defend our country, we shouldn't hire private charities to implement our social programs. Instead we should commit ourselves to fund the programs we need to provide economic, medical and other social services needed to secure our nation's freedoms, while at the same time applauding the charitable efforts of private organizations.

posted by Unknown at 11:42 PM

 

In a recent column George Will declared, "Barry is back." The parade of prominent Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger at the party's recent convention, he said, demonstrated a return to Barry Goldwater conservatism.

This would be conservatism without the religious fanaticism on which the movement has leaned for winning elections since at least the Reagan administration.

Although I fear what he saw was a staged appeal to calm the party's moderates (look at the party platform, not the lineup of speakers), I hope Will is right.

I realize that a return to classical Goldwater conservatism (Goldwater was left behind as the party turned to policies of religious and social intolerance) might put the party in a more competitive footing. I don't agree with conservative positions. Will described the movement as "muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural questions."

However, I'd rather have a rational debate over the merits of these positions than the irrational brawl that the current Republican extremism has produced. Discussion ends when one side claims to be backed by an absolute deity. That simple act of basing law on religious doctrine ends the honorable American experiment in self-government.

We can disagree on whether response to aggression should be unilateral or multilateral. We can discuss whether low taxation and light regulation is truly the best goal for the whole of American society or simply for the highest paid and most wealthy.

Traditional conservatives need to regain control of their flagship party or it will rip apart. What Will did not mention was that the protests during the convention were not all sponsored by competing political party members. Republicans have their own rifts of dissension and they are deep.

Both major parties attract radical or unwholesome movements from time to time. In the middle of the 20th Century, as Will mentioned, the Democrats secured its dominant position by embracing the segregationists. Once better minds led the party to support civil rights and voting rights that element moved to the Republican Party.

It was the genius of a few Republican leaders to notice that many of these newcomers were religious zealots and were beginning to form a powerful voting block. Ignoring the lessons of history they crafted an appeal to this group of intolerance. They were bitten by the desire to win even at the expense of their core principles.

The parties don't matter in the end. Voting for the party offering an agenda of intolerance of others is a mistake. Republicans uneasy about the extremism in their party should abstain or vote for John Kerry to aide their fellow moderates in refocusing the party. Certainly Democrats, believing in expanding liberty to all citizens, providing a healthy environment and protecting against the too frequent abuse of power, as well as leading the world as a powerful partner rather than snobbish bully, these Democrats should support John Kerry and work hard to keep the party on these worthwhile goals.

posted by Unknown at 11:16 AM