I vote for a Faith Based DMV. The states don't seem to do that well in promoting safe driving so I think the churches would do a better job.
The more one thinks about it, the more absurd it becomes
Trying it out here also LW. Actually, I liked it in both places - ha!
Well, the thread began to cross over even though the DMV hasn't much to do with compassion, except the move to take care of transactions via the Internet (at least here in California). Now, anything to avoid the lines at the DMV -- that's compassion!
(No, I'm not going to post this in the compassionate conservative discussion -- it's a little warm in there right now).
I was refering to the libertarian thread. It's getting kinda warm in there for me right now!
. Lightwizard, BillW
Where there is heat there is always hope that there will also be light
That's what I'm doing au, I'm heating my home!!!!!!!!!!!
Log into the political forums here and it may heat and light your general area. Log into the political forums at Abuzz and you've experienced Hell.
Way to kick poor abuzz when it's down GW. You brute!
Hell, LW? Them's pretty strong words.
c.i.
There's something I can't understand, and I hope people will consider this question carefully, rather than just discarding it off-handedly...
If you believe that the so-called "separation of church and state" should be inviolable, what is your opinion of the government having adherents of various religions on its payroll as federal employees?
The standard that is being set in this discussion seems to suggest that it is unacceptable for federal dollars to pay a group of people who belong to a religion for work, even if the work they are doing is secular in nature. Does it then not follow logically that it would likewise be unacceptable for federal dollars to pay an individual who belongs to a religion for work?
Or am I wrong? Can someone show me the difference, or are those expressing a categorical opinion that federally funding faith-based charities breaches the wall between church and state inconsistent in their standards?
Well, is there a difference between a group and an organization? I would say there is. A handfull of Pentacostals does not an establishment of religion make. Religions and corporations have a specific legal status not enjoyed by a like number of Presbyterians or proprietorships. On the other hand, a government's refusal to contract with, say, a Presbyterian church to perform some function for which it was not only qualified for, but was also the lowest qualified bidder, might of itself be a law respecting an establishment of religion. Let's not consider the affect on any tax exempt status of the organization. The details aren't relevant to the question or the answer.
Out of respect for the question, I won't consider the problems involved in a government's determining an employee's religion where this is a prohibited hiring practice since 1964.
Okay, c.i., political forums on Abuzz are Heck.
roger wrote:Well, is there a difference between a group and an organization? I would say there is.
Okay, then if in your view we only breach the wall between church and state when the government pays an organization for work, then how would you feel about the government paying a minister to perform secular charitable work with the poor? Still no breach?
roger wrote:Out of respect for the question, I won't consider the problems involved in a government's determining an employee's religion where this is a prohibited hiring practice since 1964.
Great. And I won't point out that if acceptability or prohibition by the government were the standard here, we would not be having this discussion, since the government has made funding faith-based charities accepted practice since 2002. :wink:
This isn't a discussion of what the government has decided is right or wrong, it's a discussion of what you and I think is right and wrong, and--to whatever extent we can ascertain it--what position the Constitution takes on the issue.
trespassers will wrote:roger wrote:Well, is there a difference between a group and an organization? I would say there is.
Okay, then if in your view we only breach the wall between church and state when the government pays an organization for work, then how would you feel about the government paying a minister to perform secular charitable work with the poor? Still no breach?
I want to be sure of your meaning here. You mean a minister, hired because he is a minister, to disburse government funds derived from my taxes? If that is your intent, I would say the wall has been breached. Further, I do not believe a law permitting or requiring such would stand a constitutional challenge, but that goes beyond belief into speculation.
roger - No, he would not be hired because he is a minister, but could he be hired despite it? He would specifically be doing the exact kind of work for which faith-based initiatives would compete under Bush's order.
Breach? Or no breach? And if so, why? He is not an organization, right?
Nice question. I am reconsidering my earlier answer. He is not hired because he is a minister, but despite being a minister? You are saying the job description does not require that he be a minister? That's something to ponder.
Why don't you remind me of this tomorrow evening by PM, if this part of the discussion doesn't become totally isolated in subsequent commentary.
I worked for a faith based organization that provided various social services to the community for many years, and believe me, it was a sticky wicket. The organization was funded through city, state and federal funds.
Having said that, and knowing the contortions that we had to go through to get around mixing the religious tenets of the organization that we were supposed to uphold, and the best interests of our clients, I am not a big fan of faith based organizations that receive tax dollars.
As far as the hiring practices of the organization, because our programs were contracted ones, they were obliged to hire people of all or no faith. In the programs that were not contracted, that were funded by the church, the employees were only of the church's faith. There was definitely a "glass ceiling" over there. It was well known that a person, not of the religion of the organization, could only advance just so far.
With all that I am FOR faith based charities, but ones that are funded privately, through the contributions of their adherents. I think that these organizations do a superior job, in a much more economical fashion, than programs funded by the government, on whatever level.
Charities run by private and religious groups were the norm in the early part of the twentieth century, and they worked. And there were far less people, proportionally, perpetually on the dole in those days!
So...where did the notion of faith-based initiatives come from? Who is Marvin Olasky and what is his connection to the President?
Quote:Marvin Olasky, the journalism professor at the University of Texas who has been a Bush adviser since 1993 and is the author of the seminal work on the subject, The Tragedy of American Compassion
From Joan Didion's essay, linked here earlier, and entirely relevant, receiving the famous blatham 4R rating (Read it, Read it, Read it, Read it)...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13857
Quote:...Olasky, who before "God found me and changed me when I was twenty-six" had wrestled first with atheism ("I was bar mitzvahed at thirteen and an atheist by fourteen") and then with the Communist Party USA ("What if Lenin is wrong? What if there is a God?"), introduces his fourteen-year-old son, Daniel, to anti-poverty programs in Texas, the Midwest, and the Northeast. The drift soon emerges. "God's in charge," a retired couple who run a community center in South Dallas tell Olasky and Daniel. "I had to learn that God's in charge," they are told by a former user of heroin and cocaine who now runs the day-to-day operation of a recovery center in Minneapolis. A teacher at an evangelical summer school in Dallas explains how "curriculum is cleverly tied" to a pending mountain field trip, for example by assigning "Bible passages concerning mountains, eagles, and hawks."
Outside Houston, they visit "Youth-Reach Houston" and its founder, "Curt Williams, forty, who wears his long black hair pulled back in a pony tail" and who in 1984 "followed a pretty girl into a church and found welcome there
. Having hit bottom, he went to church and felt spiritually compelled to throw away his drugs and pornography." In Indianapolis, they meet with Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, chief domestic policy adviser to the Bush campaign and a civic leader who had studied "the negatives (high taxes, red tape, bad schools) that drive middle-class people away from the city" and found the answer in "using his bully pulpit to promote Catholic schools," since, as he tells Olasky and Daniel, "only hardened skeptics have trouble accepting that widespread belief in a Supreme Being improves the strength and health of our communities."
Again and again, Olasky and Daniel learn of successful recoveries effected in one or another "have-not" program, which is to say a program prevented from receiving the funding it deserves for the sole reason, Olasky suggests, that it is "faith-based." Again and again, they hear the same language ("hitting bottom," "putting God in charge," "changing one life at a time"), which is, not coincidentally, that of the faith-based Twelve-Step movement, from which a good deal of the "new thinking" on welfare derives. (Alcoholics Anonymous, according to James Q. Wilson, is "the single most important organized example of personal transformation we have.")
Visiting a faith-based prison program outside Houston, the Olaskys meet Donnie Gilmore, who was "pushing thirty with a résumé of breaking into houses and stealing cars" when "his four-year-old daughter asked him about Jesus, and he realized he had never opened a Bible." Gilmore then joined the "InnerChange" program ("Texas Governor George W. Bush gave the program a try, and state officials kept the American Civil Liberties Union at bay
") developed by Prison Fellowship Ministries, which is the organization founded by Charles ("Chuck") Colson after his release from the Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Alabama and in which "the keys to success" are "God's grace and man's mentoring." "I have a couple of editions of the Bible with me," Colson reportedly said on the day he left for Maxwell to serve seven months of a one-to-three-year sentence for obstruction of justice in the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg. "That's all."
"Repeatedly," Olasky notes with approval, "Daniel and I had found that the impetus for a compassionate conservative program came out of a Bible study or some other church or synagogue function." Both father and son are made "uneasy" by more secular programs, for example KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy, a charter school in Houston, where, despite the fact that it seemed "excellent," its public nature meant that "students miss out on that added dimension," i.e., prayer and Bible study. Similarly, in Minneapolis, they visit a Goodwill program that seems to be successfully introducing women to the basic workplace manners (be on time, answer the phone politely) needed to make the transition from welfare to work. "All of this was impressive," Olasky allows, and yet, "as Daniel noted in comparing this helpful program to the faith-based equivalents we were seeing elsewhere, 'The absence of interest in God is glaring."'
