GOD FORBID

Just finished David Kuo's Tempting Faith, his account of how he came to doubt George Bush's commitment to making real investments in his much-touted faith based initiatives, on which Kuo had come to work in the White House. The White House approach, Kuo contends, prioritized polarizing votes to discredit opponents over building consensus around fighting poverty. But while Kuo criticizes the White House's use of the faith-based initiatives as a political bludgeon and criticizes the push for discrimination based on religious practice, he is unrepentant in his support for government-subsidized discrimination based on religious identity. My junior year at Yale, Kuo's boss Jim Towey came to campus and pledged that he "strongly believes" in the constitutional separation of church and state. He was working, he pledged, to "end discrimination against faith-based organizations." The next morning, the White House called on the House to stop amendments to the Community Services Block Grants Act, H.R. 3030, which would have required faith-based agencies receiving federal funding to comply with federal civil rights standards. The "Statement of Administration Policy" went so far as to threaten a veto of any bill amended to require federally-funded agencies to obey federal non-discrimination laws. It didn't come to that: all three amendments to ensure that funding from all Americans is tied to equal treatment for all Americans went down to defeat. On the same day Towey was at Yale touting the constitutionality and compassion of the administration's agenda, Kuo's friends at Focus on the Family sent out an activist alert warning that if proposed amendments to H.R. 3030 passed, "Christian charities interested in accepting federal funds would be required to ignore religious conviction in hiring -- even if potential employees practiced Islam, Judaism or no religion at all." God forbid.