Posted on 07/01/2008 10:39:03 AM PDT by Red Steel
Today marks the second day of Obama’s “Enduring American Values” week. Today’s topic: faith.
The Illinois senator will unveil its plan to overhaul the Bush Administration’s Faith-Based and Community Initiatives by helping religious organizations better learn how to apply for federal aid with a “Train the Trainers” program, and focusing the groups to provide summer learning programs to children.
Obama’s plan will not “scrap” the current program, the campaign says, but will fix it. “President Bush came into office with a promise to “rally the armies of compassion,” establishing a new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. But what we saw instead was that the Office never fulfilled its promise,” Obama will say today in Zanesville, Ohio.
The $500 million a year program, the campaign says, will level the playing field for religious groups and federal funds cannot be used to “proselytize or provide religious sectarian instruction.”
The proposal drew praise from President Bush’s one-time director of Faith Based and Community Initiatives office, John Dilulio. In a statement distributed by the Obama campaign, Dilulio said, “His plan reminds me of much that was best in both then Vice President Al Gore’s and then Texas Governor George W. Bush’s respective first speeches on the subject in 1999.”
Read Obama’s prepared remarks below the jump.
You know, faith based groups like East Side Community Ministry carry a particular meaning for me. Because in a way, they’re what led me into public service. It was a Catholic group called The Campaign for Human Development that helped fund the work I did many years ago in Chicago to help lift up neighborhoods that were devastated by the closure of a local steel plant.
(Excerpt) Read more at embeds.blogs.foxnews.com ...
This is a back door to make Christian groups hire Openly Gay people.
The strategy of a federally mandated train the trainer program and limiting the religious speech of those organizations that take advantage of federal funding disqualifies this program from anything my church can use. It is interesting, the word “evangelical” in it’s purist form means those who believe in “evangelism”—proclaiming the good news. This activity is what Obama’s team pejoritively labels prostylizing. Why would a truly evangelical church takes funds from an agency that prohibits them from the activity that is part of their core mission.
It was the fact that the federal governments uses federal funds to mandate regulation that compelled the college my daughter attends, Grove City College, to withdraw from the federal student loan program. She is getting a fabulous education in excellent modern facilities for less money than it costs my son to attend our state university.
ping to link in #23...though I am sure you’re already all over this.
That’s the longest DU thread I’ve ever seen.
The lefties at DU will hate thing but give it a pass since Obama is doing it. The lambasted Bush as a religous nut for doing this. The ACLU and Americians United for Separation of Church and state will also quitely seethe but let it go without being on all the MSM stating the horror of the program.
1 minute satirical Obama video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR6b-kWncI4
Hurry before some diversity loving (RIGHT!) Obamaniac at YouTube pulls it.
Actually, I just read the DU thread. Many of them are quoting a new press release that claims Obama’s support for faith-based-Charities is “much better” than Bush’s. Personally, I don’t like the federal government redistributing wealth to any faith-based organization (and I’m a devout Catholic), but apparently the DUers now like it as long as it merely removes things like abstinence counseling. Wow...what a principled bunch those DUers are.
Obama will “fix” the program by ensuring that faith-based funding will only go to truly deserving groups like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam prison ministry.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.