Ex-Aide Q's Bush's... Faith-Based Efforts

[Pacridge]

Ex-Aide Questions Bush Vow to Back Faith-Based Efforts


By Alan Cooperman and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 15, 2005; Page A01

A former White House official said yesterday that President Bush has failed to deliver on his promise to help religious groups serve the poor, the homeless and drug addicts because the administration lacks a genuine commitment to its "compassionate conservative" agenda.
David Kuo, who was deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for much of Bush's first term, said in published remarks that the White House reaped political benefits from the president's promise to help religious organizations win taxpayer funding to care for "the least, the last and the lost" in the United States. But he wrote: "There was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda."

The rest is here but I think you need to register:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24561-2005Feb14.html?referrer=email

 

[shuamort]

Here's a link that doesn't require registration. (I deleted my cookies last week and have been trying to remember what I logged in to a lot of newspapers as. Dagnabbit).

Disagreements in Congress over how to implement the program forced the president to enact a scaled-down version through executive order.

Kuo said the administration did not push hard enough for the program, citing the failure to support a tax incentive, promised by Bush, to promote charitable giving. The measure, which by some estimates would have cost as much as $30 billion over 10 years, would have allowed taxpayers who do not itemize deductions to get a break for donations to charities.

Kuo noted that in June 2001, the charitable tax break was removed from a large tax-cut bill, replaced by a measure that primarily benefited the wealthy — the estate-tax repeal.

My favorite part of the article:
The essay echoes sentiments of another former White House official, John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He resigned in August 2001 after seven months on the job, and was subsequently quoted in Esquire magazine as saying that the White House was run by "Mayberry Machiavellians" who sometimes put politics ahead of other causes.

There already have been lawsuits against this whole "Faith-Based Initiative"(F-BI) malarky. I've got huge issues with the government sponsoring, supporting, entwining itself, etc with any religious organization. It's a mess and is/could be unconstitutional. The F-BI is unconstitutional and hopefully will be shown as such via the court systems. (The problem being that these companies/churches are given benefits while at the same time, are free to have discriminatory hiring practices that are illegal. Not hiring minorities, women, et al. ) Hopefully this program will go down in flames.