Interfacing with faith. George W. Bush is using a program of executive orders and funding rules to undermine the Constitutional separation of church and state. But apparently that's not news.

On Tuesday, Bush signed an executive order mandating the creation of "faith-based centers" at the Commerce Department, the Veterans Affairs Department and the Small Business Administration. It's his third order in a series. As Mike Allen notes in the WaPo, that

brings to 10 the [number of] federal agencies that have offices devoted to serving as advocates of religious organizations. Officials said these three will probably be the final centers, since they complete the coverage of agencies involved in providing social services and humanitarian aid.

But as I said, that's not news, that's the fine print: both Allen and Elisabeth Bumiller in the Times can't manage to cough up those facts until near the end of their reports. The announcement of the executive order was made to coincide with Dubya's speech to the first White House Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, what Bumiller calls "a pep talk to religious groups seeking money that his administration has made available to them." And it's the speech that's news—if you can call it news when everybody reporting the story buries it deep in the inner pages.

Predictably, for Bumiller it's all about Dear Leader's sincerity and the emotional dynamic between him and his audience. Tough to get the ick off the story after a lead like this:

President Bush rallied nearly 2,000 supporters at a White House conference of religious organizations on Tuesday morning, telling them that the federal government gave $1.1 billion in grants last year to social programs operated by churches, synagogues and mosques, but that "governments cannot put love in a person's heart or a sense of purpose in a person's life."

"Amen," said a member of the audience.

Compare to Allen in the WaPo, who seems to lack Bumiller's instinct for toadying and who has an eye for the disturbing graphic detail:

The cover of the glossy, full-color booklet being distributed during a conference at the Washington Hilton yesterday showed a flaming shrub and proclaimed: "Not everyone has a burning bush to tell them their life's calling."

The Old Testament imagery suggested a religious tract, but this was a government brochure.

[Allen will, I'm sure, disclaim any intention of a pun in that "shrub," but you're free to read it as you see fit.] He's also irreverent enough to quote Dubya with his rhetorical pants down:

"Listen, I fully understand there are people in the faith community who have said, 'Why do I want to interface with the federal government?' " he said. "'Why would I want to interface with a group of people that want to try to get me to not practice my faith?' It's hard to be a faith-based program if you can't practice faith. And the message to you is, we're changing the culture here in America."

In the LA Times, Peter Wallsten comes closest to directly grappling with the question of Bush's agenda. His lead ignores the Bush speech, and focuses instead on remarks made later by Jim Towey, director of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and a real piece of work:

The head of the White House's faith-based initiatives program said Tuesday that a "culture war" was dividing the Bush administration and its critics who challenge the constitutionality of mixing church and state.

"It's true that much attention is being placed on the war in Iraq, but there's also another war that's going on," said Jim Towey ... "It's a culture war that really gets to the heart of the questions about what is the role of faith in the public square."

Towey, who has worked for Democrats and Republicans and was a lawyer for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, warned that when faith was driven out of that public square, "you almost wind up creating a godless orthodoxy."

Apparently the Ghost of Pat Buchanan Past has found a home in the White House.

And yet no one reports forthrightly on Bush's creeping theocratization of the federal human services bureaucracy—even when, as yesterday, the White House provided a ready-made news hook for the story. The sole straightforward article I can find on the subject in the past year appeared last November in the Boston Globe; it seems to have generated no followup anywhere. Is it just the lassitude of a corporate press that can't be bothered to pay attention to administrative issues?

The conventional wisdom in Washington is the faith-based initiative collapsed in 2002 when the Senate refused to pass White House legislation giving pervasively religious groups both access to federal grants and an exemption from civil rights laws that bar discrimination in hiring. The Charity Aid, Recovery and Empowerment Act, or CARE Act, a stripped-down version of an earlier bill that offers tax incentives for charitable giving, passed the House and Senate this year but is stalled in a conference committee.

Through an executive order he signed last December, and new federal-agency rules that went into effect in September, Bush has accomplished administratively many of the policy changes he proposed in the original legislation.

Turned aside in the Congress, Bush employs executive fiat to put the federal government in the business of establishing religion. A complacent press yawns and goes back to sleep.

posted by michael  5:45:55 PM  
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