In Zanesville, Ohio, on July 1, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama made a clear and unambiguous promise: that any group receiving federal grants would not be allowed to "proselytize to the people you help, and you can't discriminate against them -- or against the people you hire -- on the basis of religion."
So what happened? Nothing -- absolutely no changes to the nature of faith-based funding have been made.
And that's not the worst of it. When pressed on this matter by Amanda Knief of the Secular Coalition for America, President Barack Obama essentially said that federal funding of religious proselytizing and discrimination is OK with him.
"You have not rescinded the executive order that permits this type of discrimination," Knief told the president. "In a time of economic hardship, when it is difficult for a person to get a job based on her skills, what would you say to a woman who was denied employment based on her religion, or lack of religious beliefs, by a taxpayer [funded] organization?"
In his response, Obama described the topic as "a very difficult issue" but didn't address the central question of why taxpayers should continue funding religious discrimination. ..."It doesn't satisfy everybody," the president continued.
"I will tell you that a lot of faith-based organizations think we are too restrictive in how we define those issues. There are others, like you obviously, that think we are not restrictive enough. I think we've struck the right balance so far, but this is something we continue to be in dialogue with faith based organizations about to try to make sure that their hiring practices are as open and as inclusive as possible."
Source: Butterflies & Wheels
So some people think he hasn't gone far enough in permitting government funding of proselytizing and discrimination while others think he's gone too far in permitting government funding of proselytizing and discrimination -- and that means that he must be allowing just the right amount of government funding proselytizing and discrimination? The label "stupid" hardly seems sufficient to describe such a position.
If Barack Obama had some specific argument for why he thought the current rules were appropriate, that would be one thing -- even if I disagreed with him, it would at least (in theory) be a coherent position. But he didn't offer any sort of justification for the rules nor has anyone in his administration done so. The best he can manage as a defense is "people on both sides disagree with me".
There really are people out there who sincerely think that if "both sides" disagree with you or are mad at you, then you "must be doing something right." While that may be amusing in some contexts, it hardly qualifies as a valid political principle to base policy on. Sometimes, one side is egregiously wrong and you're wrong for trying to appease them.
This is closely analogous to the idea of "teaching both sides of the controversy." It presumes that there is a legitimate disagreement between two reasonable sides, each of which holds a reasonable position on some matter where reasonable people can reasonably disagree. In the case of evolution, that's false: there is only one scientific side and it's arguing against religious pseudoscience. It's also false in the case of government funding of proselytizing and discrimination: there is only legal side and it's fighting against theocratic fascism.
No comments:
Post a Comment