Former White House Faith-Based Director Jim Towey writes an op-ed in today's Denver Post, in advance of next week's Democratic convention in that city. He used the occasion of Saturday's Saddlebrook forum, and Rick Warren's question regarding faith-based funding and hiring discrimination, to attack (once again) the religious liberty safeguards supported by Senator Obama.
Obama's plan, you may recall, underlines the need to refrain from religious discrimination in hiring for positions created by federal money. To his credit, he stuck to those guns in an adverse environment (Barry Lynn argues the question was a set-up) on Saturday.
What gets me about critiques like Towey's - and what makes them disingenuous, frankly - is not that he obviously disagrees with an anti-discrimination safeguard, but that he falsely paints it as tantamount to dismantling the entire faith-based funding program. Towey writes:
Obama wants to abandon President Bush's — and President Clinton's — efforts to protect the right to hire on a religious basis of faith-based charities that provide taxpayer-funded social services.
...
Obama can not have it both ways — he cannot build upon President Bush's policy while jettisoning one of its core principles.
And yet, as Towey well knows, the program currently offers no such clear right to hire based on religion for
jobs created by federal funds. The "efforts" he refers to - those of President Bush and a minority in Congress to undo those protections - have failed. Towey himself acknowledges as much elsewhere in the op-ed in his discussion of Catholic Charities, and Obama tried to make this point in his
answer to Warren:
[W]e do have to be careful to make sure that we are not creating a situation where people are being discriminated against, using federal money. That's not new. That's a concept that was true under the Clinton administration. That was true under the Bush administration.
He's right. If maintaining that protection amounts to trying to "have it both ways", as Towey says, then the program has managed to "have it both ways" throughout the Bush Administration. If it would result in "jettisoning one of its core principles", then the faith-based funding initiative touted by Towey and Bush has been
rolling along without one of its core principles for the last 8 years.
It is President Bush's policy, supported by Towey and others, that would - if adopted - overhaul the relationship between religious groups and the government and unravel the already-weakened status quo, not Obama's.
Since the opening of the White House Faith-Based Office, the Bush Administration has sought to dismantle what's left of important constitutional protections that ensure there is no religious discrimination in hiring for jobs fully created by the government. Most notably in last year's re-authorization of the Head Start Program, Congress has wisely declined to go along with that reckless proposal every time. Throughout, Administration officials like Towey have touted the grand success of the Faith-Based Initiative. Yet now they would have us believe that its very existence depends on a change that would explicitly allow the federal government to create jobs that are not open to some Americans simply because of their religious beliefs, or lack thereof.
It sounds to me like it is Jim Towey who is trying to have it both ways: on one hand proclaiming the greatness of Bush's Faith-Based Initiative, and on the other, warning that the program will fall to pieces without this major change. Safeguards against religious discrimination are good for religion, and protect believers of all faith. They have also done nothing to stop or impede partnership between government and religious organizations in providing services with a secular purpose. There is no reason now to believe that such protections would suddenly threaten those historic partnerships.
