Warner Todd Huston
BigGovernment.com
5/17/2010
Widely reviled by the left, Bush’s faith-based initiatives were claimed to be evidence that Bush was a “religious zealot” trying to destroy America with evil Christianity. Now, two years into the Obama administration, we are seeing what Obama intends to do with his continuation of Bush’s faith-based offices: he wants to use them to push the religion of Greenicanism on America’s churches.
This month Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships issued its final report of recommendations and the result is nothing short of astonishing. (download .pdf file)
The question that immediately comes to mind, of course, is if the left will explode in excoriation of Obama’s faith-based policies as it did with Bush’s?
The left was out of its mind over Bush’s ideas. In 2004, for instance, the website TheocracyWatch.org hyperbolically said, “Under the Bush administration, our country is experiencing a major transformation from a secular to a religious government. The President’s faith-based initiative is central to this transformation and raises serious questions about church-state separation.” This was the left-wing talking points du jour on Bush’s faith-based programs.
It wasn’t just the left, but even from the libertarian side Bush’s ideas were attacked. Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute said that the faith-based initiative was a “direct violation” of the Constitution.
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