Monday, March 02, 2009
Obama and Aid to Faith-based Organizations
While not a Born Again Christian like his predecessor, President Obama had been quite open about his position on matters of faith.
To his credit, on January 20, 2009, during his inaugural , Barack Obama said:
- "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers."
He is a practising Christian. In today's America it would be unthinkable to expect a "non-believer" to be elected to public office. Jews are an exception but people of other faiths -- Hindus, Buddhists, or ( perish the thought) a Muslim contender would have small chance.
Obama is playing his cards to woo the faithful of different religious groups. Whether he would benefit from it in the long term is to be seen.
What is disturbing is his decision to continue with a Bush-era practice -- faith-based community initiatives.
Susan Jacoby in NY Times:
- "It is truly dismaying that amid all the discussion about President Obama’s version of faith-based community initiatives, there has been such a widespread reluctance to question the basic assumption that government can spend money on religiously based enterprises without violating the First Amendment. The debate has instead focused on whether proselytizing or religious hiring discrimination should be permitted when church groups take public money. This shows how easy it is to institutionalize a bad idea based on unexamined assumptions about service to a greater good.
- Yet we are moving blindly ahead with faith-based federal spending as if it were not a radical break with our past. If faith-based initiatives, first institutionalized by the executive fiat of a conservative Republican president, become even more entrenched under a liberal Democratic administration, there will be no going back. In place of the First Amendment, we will have a sacred cash cow.
Sacred cash cow is very apt. We can rest assured that there will be no lack of organizations lining up to milk it.
International Criminal Court
The news that the ICC is "considering" whether the Palestinian Authority meets the requirements to be eligible to bring war crimes charges against Israeli troops is a good sign. Whether or not Israelis stand on the dock, what they did in Gaza is being exposed.
Peter Beaumont, Guardian The international criminal court is considering whether the Palestinian Authority is "enough like a state" for it to bring a case alleging that Israeli troops committed war crimes in the recent assault on Gaza. The deliberations would potentially open the way to putting Israeli military commanders in the dock at The Hague over the campaign, which claimed more than 1,300 lives, and set an important precedent for the court over what cases it can hear. |
