Fuzzy Logic

As I was browsing the internet earlier I saw a post about a further expansion of Bush’s “Faith Based Initiatives”.  Assuming it was another play by McCain to the right, I figured that I would pass on reading and went along my merry way.  Well, a bit later it turned up on Digg under a different headline:  “Obama courts conservatives with new faith program.”  WHAT? Obama, the supposed Democratic candidate, is carrying on a staple of the Bush administration? This pandering is getting ridiculous!

First of all, I wasn’t too happy when Obama announced what I call the “One-Step Forward, Two Steps Back” education plan earlier this year.  What the plan amounts to is cutting the funding on NASA’s development of their next spaceship which, by the way, is currently projected to come into service 5 years after the Space Shuttle is discontinued.  After five years Obama pledges (which means a lot) to restart the funding on the project which would put the project ten years past the decommissioning of the Space Shuttle.  I don’t understand the idea of cutting one of our most important scientific ventures for the ability to, among other things, give more pre-school access to children.  Do I think pre-school is important?  Yes.  Do I think we should be relying upon the goodwill of Russia to send our astronauts into space?  Hell no.

Now, of course, Obama has added onto the waste of the government by pledging more money to faith-based initiatives.  This is getting to be quite ridiculous.  If it involves faith, the government needs to leave it alone.  The really ridiculous part of this is that Obama wants to allow faith based groups to ’selectively’ hire and fire based on religion in their ‘non tax-payer supported’ sections.  This seems, to me, to be cruising for a problem.  The loopholes that groups could easily exploit to take advantage again boggle my mind.  If their publicly funded part had one person and their other section had the rest of their employees, they could very easily grab federal money to support both parts.  Why is the government wanting to limit this funding to religious groups?  Why not social groups?  Why not sports groups?  Why not groups based around sexual orientation?  It seems ridiculous that the religious groups get a huge wave of funding simply because they are religious.  Why do they get that free pass?

Obama differs from Bush in his public reasoning for the groups:

Obama also chose a different emphasis for why religious charities are an important answer to solving poverty and other social problems: because they better know the people who are hurting, instead of Bush’s argument that religion itself is a transforming power the government must not be afraid to harness.

(And, for the record, that’s an AP story, I hope they don’t send me a Cease and Desist Letter!)  While I don’t know if Obama is being completely truthful, I must admit that his reasoning falls in line with mine much more than Bush’s policy does.  That being said, it still sounds slightly bogus–why are religious groups that much more in tune with the poverty-stricken people than, say, a teacher group that wants to help kids in their free time?  I think that a random religious person may very possibly be less in tune with poverty than a teacher who teaches at an inner-city school (like the one I am currently employed at).

The other interesting thing is that Obama, in this speech, seemed to comment on a lot of things in addition to this, including:

• Talking about his support for expanded Electronic Eavesdropping by the Federal Government
• Talking about his plan for an Iraq pullout that has been expanded to 16 months now
• Expressing his distaste for the Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Louisiana law that allowed the state to execute criminals that rape children

Obama is certainly the Democrat candidate and it is never certain that he will follow through on his campaign promises, but this is rather scary for those who support Obama and were hoping for a candidate that was separate from the Republican tactics we have seen in the past 7 years.  He’s trying harder and harder lately to show how ‘hard’ he is on terrorism and how much he’s a centrist candidate and while that’s probably popular to the masses, it’s scary to me.