When President Barack Obama launches his version of the faith-based initiative Thursday, he will expand the mission…He will also try to avoid the thorniest constitutional issues that beset the program for years under his predecessor. Mr. Obama’s approach to the federal faith office reflects his search for common ground on contentious social issues, and his willingness to dial back some of his campaign positions.
Okay…there shouldn’t be such a thing as ‘the federal faith office’ – that should be an obvious clanging embarrassing oxymoron, or else a symptom of lunacy or breakdown that should send everyone screaming for the hills. There shouldn’t be a fucking ‘federal faith office’ because the state should not be imposing ‘faith’ on people because ‘faith’ is a bad defective stupid wrong broken incompetent erroneous way to think. I’m sick of this crap. I’m sick of hearing ‘faith’ glorified on all sides at all hours of the day and night; I’m sick of being unable to escape the stupid mistaken pigheaded idea that ‘faith’ is 1) a good thing 2) morally superior 3) a sign of warmth and normality and all-around okayness; I’m sick of having religion dressed up as ‘faith’ as if that made it somehow less intrusive or coercive or obnoxious. I’m sick of it. It’s sentimental, it’s patronizing, it’s deceptive, and it implicitly denigrates rationality and critical thinking.
[T]he Bush plan was ensnared by constitutional questions about the separation between church and state, most notably whether an organization that received tax dollars can make hiring decisions on the basis of religion. As a candidate, Mr. Obama came down firmly against such hiring. But on Thursday, he will take a more nuanced position, saying that these issues should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
‘Nuanced’ – that’s more manipulation by wording, more ‘framing,’ more bullshit. Try that another way: ‘most notably whether an organization that received tax dollars can make hiring decisions on the basis of race. As a candidate, Mr. Obama came down firmly against such hiring. But on Thursday, he will take a more nuanced position.’ Maybe there are some issues on which we don’t want a more ‘nuanced’ position, maybe there are some issues where ‘nuance’ is just a sly way to bargain away other people’s rights. Consider this: an organization that can make hiring decisions on the basis of religion can exclude all women, because women’s subordination is religious doctrine for many ‘faith communities.’ Religious institutions are already exempt from various gender equality laws, meaning they are permitted to keep all-male clergy. That’s bad enough, and extending it to other kinds of hiring is worse. We don’t want nuance here, we want principle; we want Not One Step Farther; we want never again; we want equality is the law of the land. We want the state not to pay groups to treat some people as second-order citizens.
That approach will likely anger some on the left who were hoping for a clean break with the Bush policy. In a speech last July, Mr. Obama presented a more clear-cut view of how to draw the constitutional line. “If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them or against the people you hire on the basis of their religion,” he said then. But the new approach will please people like David Kuo, who was deputy director of the Bush faith-based office.
Yes no doubt it will, but why should we want to please people like David Kuo? Why should we keep forcing ‘faith’ on everyone? Why can’t we have the other thing now?
Comments
22 responses to “A triumph of framing”
I think maybe you’re coming to grasp what some of us tried to declaim before the election: that The O didn’t mean a thing he said, he said whatever he needed to to get elected, and now he’s throwing more encumbrances under the bus.
Welcome to disillusionment; he’s here for four years minimum
“few are closer to the people than our churches, our synagogues, our temples, and our mosques.”
I suppose Obama will be repeating these words to the invited guests at the “morning prayer breakfast”??
Marie-Therese, how about: “”few are closer to the people than our churches, our synagogues, our temples, our mosques, our racetracks, our casinos and other shrines where we make our appeals to the Gods and Goddesses of good fortune.” I think it could be a winner.
I get the feeling that in the US, for eminently understandable historical reasons, religion counts for more than it does here in Australia, where the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches are struggling to stay afloat at parish level. In Australian state and federal elections, whether or not a candidate has affiliation to some church (provided it is in the main stream) is never an issue. But in the US (please correct me if I am wrong) a candidate with no church affiliation would alienate far too many voters to stay in the contest.
Obama is a politician first, otherwise he would not be in the White House, and thus the target for the cynicism displayed by KMcC. It’s too easy to be a knocker IMHO.
So far, within the operational limits the society that put him there imposes, Obama has been quite brilliant, also IMHO.
A Catholic got into an argument with a Jew over some decision made by the Pope. In exasperation the Catholic said: “Who do expect the man to be – Jesus Bloody Christ?” To which came the reply: “Why not? One of our boys made it.”
Obama is till in that race too,
Oh come on, Kevin, I’m not so naive or so infatuated that I thought Obama was going to be Without Flaw, and furthermore I said that. I never liked the faithy thing and I still don’t. Nothing’s changed (except what Obama’s now saying about this particular subject).
I’m waayyy too tired to write a coherent comment, but I just had to register my disgust at Obama’s continuation of the Federal Faith Office. Thanks for posting it, OB. Being American is so goddamned tireseome these days.
P.S. – Yeah, his “no religion condones the taking of innocent lives” bullshit didn’t escape me. Fucking politician (who knows better).
The sort of knee-jerk cynicism expressed by KMcC is really irritating.
It’s not as if you have to choose between thinking that Obama is the second coming, and thinking he’s a deceitful liar.
Any politician who wants to achieve their agenda has to do some things for the sake of political expediency. It’s simply naive to suppose otherwise.
I would rather have a liberal political leader who is “tainted” than one who has preserved his ideological purity at the expense of power.
I agree Jakob president Obama has to play the hand he is dealt and as aprox 90% of Americans are religious it just seems to be a pragmatic position that he is taking.
It’s not cynicism – it’s idealism (maybe they’re closer than I realise): ideally, I’d like politicians to do less and (as importantly) promise less, for people to expect less of them and to invest less hope in them, and for the machinery of coercion known as taxation to be used only for extremely limited ends and only for those things, such as defence of the realm and the administration of justice (ie the use of force), that cannot be bought and sold between consenting adults.
But keep on believing, folks. Obama’s gonna change it
KMcC,
I think the reasons you dislike Obama may be precisely the same reasons the rest of us like him.
let me see… why don’t I like him…. his sitting for 20 years in Reverend Wright’s pews but never noticing what a nutcake he was; likewise Billy Ayers (really good judgement there from the top civil servant in the USA); his desire to grab more power for the government, aka the stimulus bill, aka porkulus; his protectionist rhetoric (I pray it’s only rhetoric); his desire for unconditional talks with the enemies of civilisation (yet more superb judgement from the President); his transparent cynicism re religion – I mean, it’s one thing to mouth platitudes to appease religious voters, but why have an odious figure like Warren deliver some sky fairy verbiage in front of the watching world? I could go on, but I hope you get my drift.
Ian, or this. Few are closer to the people than our faith appurtenances (belongingness). As they are annexed to another thing, (such as that of the presidency) that is more worthy.
It is snowing in Dublin – expect you Aussies are basking in the baking mid-day sun?
KMcC: This train don’t carry no jokers. Are you seriously suggesting that the McCain-Palin combination if in office right now would be (a) carrying no baggage of past political wheeling and dealing and/or (b) not acting as porters, beaters and bearers for some Sahibs riding on the (GOP) elephant behind them?
If you are, then I’d say the safest course for you is to keep on believing brother believer, accepting as you do the real risk of hypocrisy; because the transition to reality could blow your mind.
Marie-Therese: As I prepare for two days of record heat (even for Australia) it strikes me that as reasonable people we could reach a compromise, say at around 20 degrees C.
You are at freezing point, and we are 40% of the way (literally) to boiling point. If one wants to knock up a stew, one certainly does not need a fire.
Ayers, for godsake – yeah right Obama is responsible for Ayers. He knows him slightly, the way he knows thousands of people, so somehow Ayers becomes his doing. And thus we wake up and find ourselves at a Sarah Palin rally circa September 2008. Yawn.
“president Obama has to play the hand he is dealt and as aprox 90% of Americans are religious it just seems to be a pragmatic position that he is taking.”
Gosh, Richard, how did America ever get on without a Federal Faith Office to funnel taxpayer dollars to religious organizations in the centuries prior to Bush fils?
Reverend Wright was political gold for Obama. For months, his enemies were repeating how he was associated with a CHRISTIAN PREACHER. The religious are crazy anyway, so it really didn’t matter that he ranted against the US – he sounded like a typical evangelical preacher to the ears of most of the country. Want to know why the ‘Muslim’ title didn’t stick? Reverend Wright.
Obama wanted to be president… that’s kinda crazy.
Obama is religious… that’s kinda crazy too.
It’s why we (re:citizens) always have to keep on it, because these people always have a bit of crazy in them.
See: B&W news.
I just knew it, from the mere mention of “faith” that Blair would be lurking around somewhere at the faithful prayer breakfast table and stuffing his face with the ‘full “faith” works’ and calling for religious faith to be restored “to its rightful place as a guide to our world”.
“God bless the American people.
I’ve just come from another discussion group, populated by educated U.S. residents and I was told that religion
is natural and that atheism (meaning me) is not natural. So don’t expect much from Obama, given the country he has to govern. God is dead, over, fini, muerto, acabado, but lots of people haven’t heard the news.
Yes but amos you can’t draw any sweeping conclusions about the US from what some educated U.S. residents say in a discussion group, because discussion groups aren’t a proper sample. Of course lots of people haven’t heard the news…but that doesn’t mean that Obama is required to allow religious groups that receive federal money to go on discriminating in hiring.
Sure, religion’s natural. It’s a naturally-evolved mechanism to provide meaning, reassurance and group identity. Archaeological evidence suggests that even Neandertals had a sense of the supernatural.
But hey, the classic response to that is very simple: if we never went against nature, we’d be having this discussion in a cave… [And certainly not on teh intertubes…]
As for Obama, I think his religion is just something people have to accept [with or without whinging]. Better to have someone trying to do the right thing for what we may think the wrong reasons, than those who would do the wrong thing, sure that they had the right reasons.
Yeah, it’s more natural to piss on the floor of the cave or the church than to walk (or run) to the bathroom, but you can’t say that to a religious person: you have to be respectful of their faith. So it becomes impossible to talk to them seriously.
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