February 2009 Archives

Simon, in a telephone interview with The Jewish Week, said the archbishop apologized for the impression given by the pope's action that the Catholic Church condones denial of the Holocaust's historical authenticity. "We're embarrassed. This is inappropriate," she reported the archbishop as saying about lifting of the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, who has said the Holocaust was exaggerated and no Jews died in the Nazi gas chambers.

The government's human rights record remained poor and worsened in some areas. During the year the government increased its severe cultural and religious repression of ethnic minorities in Tibetan areas and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), increased detention and harassment of dissidents and petitioners, and maintained tight controls on freedom of speech and the Internet. Abuses peaked around high-profile events, such as the Olympics and the unrest in Tibet. As in previous years, citizens did not have the right to change their government. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), both local and international, continued to face intense scrutiny and restrictions. Other serious human rights abuses included extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners, and the use of forced labor, including prison labor. Workers cannot choose an independent union to represent them in the workplace, and the law does not protect workers' right to strike.

To avoid relying on a per se rule to say when speech is governmental, the best approach that occurs to me is to ask whether a reasonable and fully informed observer would understand the expression to be government speech, as distinct from private speech the government chooses to oblige by allowing the monument to be placed on public land. This reasonable observer test for governmental character is of a piece with the one for spotting forbidden governmental endorsement of religion in the Establishment Clauses cases....The adoption of it would thus serve coherence within Establishment Clause law, and it would make sense of our common understanding that some monuments on public land display religious symbolism that clearly does not express a government's chosen views.

But what we saw instead was that the Office never fulfilled its promise. Support for social services to the poor and the needy have been consistently underfunded. Rather than promoting the cause of all faith-based organizations, former officials in the Office have described how it was used to promote partisan interests. As a result, the smaller congregations and community groups that were supposed to be empowered ended up getting short-changed.

Well, I still believe it's a good idea to have a partnership between the White House and grassroots groups, both faith-based and secular. But it has to be a real partnership - not a photo-op. That's what it will be when I'm President. I'll establish a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The new name will reflect a new commitment. This Council will not just be another name on the White House organization chart - it will be a critical part of my administration.

So, at a time when the poor and needy are more at risk than they've been in decades, why does Obama's new Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP) seem to be missing in action? Three reasons suggest themselves:

1. Laws governing faith-based social service provision--including on employment--have turned out to be more complicated than the Obama apparat realized.

2. After eight years of George W. Bush, it has gotten harder to bring together those of diverse religious views on a common faith-based agenda.

3. Since the summer, the economic woes of the poor and needy have far outstripped the capacity of even a beefed-up White House faith-based office to deal with.

The news, however, is that despite the economy, the war, and at least some campaigning by Obama, evangelicals remained unmoved in their support for the Republican candidate.

Laurie Goodstein of the NYT was kind enough to make available some number-crunching of the exit poll numbers on white evangelicals that the pollsters, Edison/Mitofsky, did for her; and it's pretty interesting stuff. The margin among 18-29 year-olds went from 83-16 for Bush in 2004 to 66-32 for McCain in 2008. Among 30-44 year-olds, the shrinkage was from 86-12 to 76-23. Among the 45-64 year-olds, there was essentially no change: 76-23 to 76-22. And among those 65 and older, the GOP margin grew, from 68-32 for Bush to 72-26. So we're talking about swings toward Obama of 33 and 20 points in the younger cohorts, and towards McCain of 1 and 10 points in the older cohorts.

Following the General Audience the Holy Father briefly greeted Mrs Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, together with her entourage.

His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church's consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development.

Your petitioners believe that all mankind are entitled to equal rights and privileges, esp. the rights of conscience...and that all human laws which obliged a man to worship in any lawfully prescribed mode, time, or place or which compel him to pay taxes or in any way to assist in the support of a religious teacher unless on his voluntary contract, are unjust and oppressive.

The dust is settling on the "bipartisan" stimulus bill and one thing is clear: it is anti-religious.

Yes, both the House and Senate bills have a provision that prohibits federal dollars for higher education construction grants to be used for:

"...modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities--used for sectarian instruction, religious worship...or a school or department of divinity; or in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission."

You would think the ACLU drafted this bill...

"If the message to religious groups is, you're welcome in the public square if you alter hiring practices and water down your religious identity, you're going to lose a lot of them," says Jim Towey, who directed faith-based initiatives under Bush.

"You're welcome to the public purse if you alter hiring practices and water down your religious identity."

The separation of church and state is a principle President Obama supports firmly - not only because it protects our democracy, but also because it protects the plurality of America's religious and civic life.

(C) modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities--
        (i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or
        (ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission

"So, say an agency secretary reaches out to us and asks a question about a particular grant recipient," DuBois told Christianity Today. "They will say, 'Hey, can you look into this?' and start that mechanism, and then we'll provide some feedback to them or elevate it to the President if necessary."

DuBois said the office will look at hiring issues on a case-by-case basis. "[Obama has] been very clear that he thinks this program should be legal and constitutional, and he has a big-picture principle against discrimination," DuBois said. "He wasn't able to talk at that point about how it works within the context of the government, because he wasn't there yet."

In her story on OFANP in today's NYT, Laurie Goodstein writes:

Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal minister who led religious outreach for Mr. Obama during the presidential race, will direct the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Mr. DuBois said in an interview, "The president is still very much committed to clear constitutionality and legality in this program. He's committed to nondiscrimination."

But Mr. DuBois said that after Mr. Obama gave his speech in Ohio "we have realized there's a tremendous lack of clarity in this area, so we'll review on a case by case basis."

"If we are consistently finding the same thing, and presenting the same recommendations to the president," he said, then the administration might seek to recommend a change in the law."

This makes no sense to me. Granted, there's a good deal of unclarity in the law in this area. But the way to resolve it is to lay down the operative principle and indicate how it is to be applied, not deal with situations on a case-by-case basis. In normal parlance, case-by-case would mean that every time a question about a particular grant came up, it would be referred to the lawyers, and then brought to the president. But that's ridiculous.

What "cases" is DuBois talking about? And what are the standards by which the recommendations are going to be made? The whole issue here is whether or not the operative principle will be the one that Obama articulated in that Ohio speech: no faith-based job discrimination when the feds are footing the bill.

Update: This LAT piece by Peter Wallsten and Duke Helfand is on the ball by finding Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va) and eliciting his unhappiness with Obama's punting on the hiring issue. It would have been interesting to hear Scott's response to the following question: Why didn't you step up to question the faith-based hiring waiver on SCHIP yesterday?

1. Notwithstanding the hat-tip to church-state separation, this is definitely a walk-back from Obama's campaign promise not to allow faith-based hiring discrimination for federally funded programs.
2. Kicking it over to the lawyers will provide him with some cover--but it won't solve everything.
3. Using the office to engage the rest of the world in some kind of discussion about religion is a major departure, and suggest that this office is more about religion than service provision.
4. The Advisory Council is very heavy with evangelicals (of various stripes), light with everyone else, including Jews, Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Secular providers. Not a Muslim in sight.
5. There are still 10 open slots, which will presumably be filled with more non-evangelicals.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release February 5, 2009

Obama Announces White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships

Washington (February 5, 2009) – President Barack Obama today signed an executive order establishing the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will work on behalf of Americans committed to improving their communities, no matter their religious or political beliefs.

Neil Rubin, the editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times, just sent in by way of comment the following quotes from his interview with Cardinal William Keeler, who as Episcopal Moderator for Catholic-Jewish Relations carries the Jewish portfolio for the bishops conference:

“This is completely out of order. It’s just ridiculous that [Bishop Williamson] would make the statements.

“What I hope the Jewish community realizes is that the pope was blindsided in this event. … If he had known of these remarks, it would have been pointed out to him that it was impossible to lift the excommunications for Bishop Williamson.

“I just received a letter from Cardinal Walter Kasper, chair of the Vatican’s Commission for the Religious Relations with the Jews. He wrote in part, `We have had many letters of deep concern from the Jewish side on the implications of the lifting of the excommunications. Now, the Pope himself and our Office will do what is possible in order to limit the damage. The statement of the Pope last Wednesday was helpful, but will not be the last one. We are preparing more. I myself am in direct contact with the Grand Rabbinate in Jerusalem and the Ambassador of Israel to the Holy See. The general position is absolutely clear: To deny the Holocaust is totally unacceptable and a bishop who does it cannot function in the Catholic Church. The four bishops are still suspended and it will take presumably a longer process of dialogue until they finally will be in full communion.’

“What is implied by the lifting of the excommunication is simply that they are free to receive the sacraments, but they are not rehabilitated as bishops or as priests even. They cannot administer any sacrament.”

As we await the president's executive order establishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (new acronym = OFANP), Gorski's back with more from his "religious leader with knowledge of the plans." The man with the plans now says that the order will direct White House lawyers and officials to work with DOJ in developing a hiring policy for what we might call Faith-Based 2.0. Neither side, according to the man, will get everything they want. There's a lot of complexity here, including the fact that the new SCHIP signed by the president yesterday appears to establish a hiring waiver for faith-based service providers using government funds.

In his talk at the prayer breakfast this morning, the president put his approach this way:

The goal of this office will not be to favor one religious group over another – or even religious groups over secular groups. It will simply be to work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities, and to do so without blurring the line that our founders wisely drew between church and state.

It matters, and not just to us religion nerds. In today's story, Gorski has Jim Wallis "downplaying" the significance of the hiring issue: "He said it came up only once in transition meetings, and that poverty, human trafficking and the Middle East were discussed in much more detail." That's Wallis saying, "Listen, sonny, we've been dealing with the big issues facing humankind, not that picayune shit you nitpicking media types keep picking at." But the hiring issue is what doomed Bush's effort to get Faith-Based 1.0 through Congress, and it could easily turn into a monster for Obama as well. From Wright through Warren, he's shown a persistent tendency to underestimate the toxic potential of religion in politics.

In his prayer breakfast remarks, he said:

We will also reach out to leaders and scholars around the world to foster a more productive and peaceful dialogue on faith. I don't expect divisions to disappear overnight, nor do I believe that long-held views and conflicts will suddenly vanish. But I do believe that if we can talk to one another openly and honestly, then perhaps old rifts will start to mend and new partnerships will begin to emerge. In a world that grows smaller by the day, perhaps we can begin to crowd out the destructive forces of zealotry and make room for the healing power of understanding.

Update: WSJ version, with on-the-record stuff from DuBois.

In the latest round of The Big CLURT Smackdown, Pastordan is up on Religion Dispatches with a response to Robbie Jones' cri de coeur against critics of the "Governing Agenda to End the Culture Wars." Personally, I think there's probably some (excuse the expression) common ground to be had here. If the Third Way folks had, for example, been a bit more modest about what they were doing, calling it, say, "A Few Goals We Can Agree On," there would have been fewer brickbats thrown. And Pastordan (under whose crusty prophetic exterior there appears to be a heart of mush) would probably agree that agreeing to move forward on some abortion-reduction programs would be OK, for example.

But what he misses in his plea for hard-edged debate is what I take to be the real purpose of this exercise, at least so far as some of the engaged progressives are concerned. With Thomas Frank, they see the culture wars as a massive means of distracting conservative church-goers from voting in their economic self-interest, and believe that if they can just create enough of a DMZ between the two sides, then there will be no problem getting the rest of the progressive agenda through. And the religious right sees it the same way, which is why it's so resistant to left-deviationism (cf. Rich Cizik). So if Pastordan would just agree to sell his abortion-and-GLBT-loving soul for a mess of Third Way pottage, we'd be all set, right? How about it, Dan?

Roma locuta et locuta et locuta. Causa not finita.

Eric Gorski's got some more skinny on COFANP, and I can't say it inspires confidence. Apparently there will be an advisory board composed of religious leaders and secular social service pros that will meet "at least twice a year," for which purpose is unclear. The names of a few of the members have been dribbled out by Gorski's source, "a religious leader familiar with the details." These include a couple of prominent evangelicals--the past president of the Southern Baptist Convention and the ever-present Joel Hunter--plus Rabbi David Saperstein, who if I were forced to put money on it would be my bet for the "religious leader familiar with the details." Saperstein, the maitre d' of all the major religious coalitions of the past two decades, has been a good deal in evidence in the opening days of the Obama administration, praying at the National Prayer Service, giving his hecksher to the CLURT "governing agenda." Whatever, the source signaled that there would be a wide array of folks on the board, including representation from the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered community. SBL meets GLBT!

Gorski's got his eye on the thorny hiring issue, and there it looks very much like the White House wants to finesse the issue. As in:

It remains unclear whether the Obama administration will rescind executive orders from then-President George W. Bush that allowed religious groups that get government money to hire only those who share their religious beliefs.

However, the religious leader knowledgeable of the plans for the revamped office said: "You can do a lot of things without rescinding those orders. That's not a necessary step to make changes."

"I believe it's not practical and it's not going to happen — and the president knows the backlash from the faith community would be egregious," Rodriguez said. "To push the envelope on that, to say, for example, 'You're going to have to hire gays and lesbians' ... that would be unprecedented."

German bishops are pretty stand-up guys. American bishops, not so much.

Update: Better, I guess, than silence. The strategy, I guess, is without blaming the Vatican to try to make sure no further steps are taken without an SSPX cave. Good luck with that.

Howard Friedman has noticed that the Senate-approved version of SCHIP, which is expected to pass the House later this week, provides for grants to faith-based providers "consistent with the requirements of ... 42 U.S.C. 300x–65 relating to a grant award to nongovernmental entities." And according to my reading of the reg, that means that such grants come with the Title VII waiver permitting faith-based providers to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion.

Now, among the things funded under SCHIP is substance-abuse treatment. And nowhere is the issue of employment discrimination more important than here. Why? Because faith-based substance-abuse programs--not so much AA and its kin but of the evangelical kind--are very often predicated on bringing clients to Christ as the "treatment modality." That's why it's crucial to them that they be able to hire their own kind. The idea that public monies should be going to such programs is, ah, problematic. But leaving that aside, here would seem to be a place for the new administration to deal with the president's campaign promise not to permit employment discrimination under faith-based social service provision. It doesn't seem kosher to let this bill just slide on through without comment. Yo, Bobby Scott!

P.S. If you care to send a comment to the White House on this, here's where.

The New Republic has posted a long article by Sam Tanenhaus that purports to be an autopsy of the conservative movement in America, but a good hunk of the corpse lies unexamined. Not to get all Mattingly on you, but there's barely a mention of religion in the entire piece, which seems like an odd omission given that religiosified politics has been the sustaining force in the conservative movement for the past generation. What's Tanenhaus' problem?

The burden of his argument is the old lament that America has never been able to create a real Edmund Burke-style conservativism:

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.

Closest to Burkean conservatism is the conservative Catholic intelligentsia, with its natural law argumentation and its high culture sensibilities. But as a force in the world, it has been far less consequential than neoconservatism, the other intellectual power on the right. It's the evangelicals who really need to be placed in the story--and they're the tertium quid that doesn't fit. For on the one hand, they do carry with them a sense that society requires fixed and eternal moral values in order to function properly. But on the other, their permanent sense of beleagueredness combined with their proselytizing imperative ill suits them to play the establishmentarian role Burke envisaged for religion in society (cf. Rick Warren at the Inaugural). Social Stability, for them, always comes in second to Revival. Bottom line: The Burkean schema cannot reckon with the ebb and flow and evangelicalism in American conservatism.

JTA's Eric Fingerhut reports that Michael Steele enjoyed good relations with the Jewish community in Maryland. Neil Rubin of the Baltimore Jewish Times sees it a little differently. There was that unfortunate incident where Steele compared stem-cell research to Nazi experiments. Rubin also calls attention to Steele's role as head of President Bush's faith-based operation in the state, when he was less that forthcoming about how that was to operate. The main point Rubin makes--and it's picked up by James Besser over at the New York Jewish Week, is that by the standards of Maryland Republicanism, Steele is a real social conservative. That is to say, he's a far cry from your standard, pro-choice Northeast GOP governor type.

But the question, for my money, is less what Steele's own positions may be (or have been) than how he conducts party rebuilding. If he's serious about the task, he's got to get social moderates back under the tent. And in that regard, Jewish Republicans may be a useful bellwether. No one believed Obama would win close to 80 percent of the Jewish vote in November, and so long as the GOP is known as the POP (Party of Palin), they're not coming back.

Pew has a good Q&A with GW law prof Chip Lupu on the jurisprudence governing (or not) faith-based hiring when you've got a federal grant. To say it's a bit of a legal thicket is a bit of an understatement. But while I'm no lawyer, one aspect of the Bush administration's argumentation for allowing such hiring seems profoundly wrong-headed: that it unfairly burdens religious institutions to be forced to obey non-discrimination rules when hiring under a government grant. Compare it to the "unfair burden" argument regarding the IRS rules against partisan politics, where the courts have repeatedly held that churches don't have a free speech right to be exempt from taxation. In this case, taking the public dollar is a choice to perform a secular social service that hardly merits the right to be exempt from federal hiring rules. Legal niceties aside, the compelling principle to me is that the government ought not be in the business of underwriting the religious character of faith-based institutions. And that's what letting them hire only their own kind with public funds does.

Michael Barone might be a right-wing ideologue, and a pompous ass to boot, but no one I know has a better grasp of American political constituencies state by state and district by congressional district. His analysis of what the Republican Party needs to do cuts through the nonsense about somehow appealing to minorities and cuts to the chase: the need to recover well-to-do social moderates--those country club suburbanites who may have voted Democratic the past couple of cycles but are hardly locked into the party of Clinton and Obama. Here's how he ends his latest RCP column:

Going upscale also means downplaying the cultural issues that were an important reason for Republican victories from 1980 to 2004. Here, young voters are critical, and their attitudes give guidance. They oppose criminalization of abortion, but they also disfavor it -- the position of the great middle of the electorate. They tend to favor same-sex marriage -- the days of winning votes by opposing it are nearing an end. And while they seem blithely confident that government action can solve problems like health care, they are also a generation that insists on choice in their personal lives. Members of the iPod generation don't wait for their elders to tell them what the top 40 songs are. They make their own playlists.

There's a tension here, which Republicans can exploit, between the tactics of the MyObama campaign and the policies he favors that would limit choices -- one-size-fits-all government health insurance, the effective abolition of secret ballot unionization elections, and environmental policies that reduce your choice of cars and increase the price of energy.

Republicans can argue that their policies will let you choose your future. No, I don't have a candidate in mind, and I don't think Republicans can abandon cultural conservatives altogether. But upscale seems to me to be the way to go.