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March 12th, 2007at 7:28 am
Below is the text of Lee Goodman’s video commentary, “Faith Based.” Please add your comments.
The Federal Government is soliciting bids for a contract. They want to pay someone to set up rehabilitation programs for prisoners. Rehabilitating prisoners is important, and it’s hard to do, so you might think the government would want to give the contract to whoever could do the best job. But a lot of competent people aren’t even going to be allowed to bid on this contract, because in order to get this contract, you have to use a faith-based approach to rehabilitation. In other words, you have to preach religion to the prisoners.
When the Bush administration announced it would allow faith-based organizations to provide government funded services, it might just have seemed that parochial schools would be allowed to rent their gyms for after-school basketball programs just like the public schools did. Now we see what Bush really had in mind, which is to rig the contracting process so that religious organizations are the only ones that can get the contracts.
Prisoner rehabilitation used to be done by government employees. Because of the separation of church and state clause in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, those employees couldn’t teach religion to prisoners or anyone else. The government isn’t supposed to be preaching religion. The Bush administration decided to try to get around the Constitution by using contractors, not government employees, to preach to prisoners.
Not only does this allow the government to preach religion, it also allows the government to push Jews out of the social work profession. Here’s how. Bush signed an executive order that says faith-based organizations don’t have to comply with the anti-discrimination laws when they hire people, even if they use federal contract money to pay their employees. So, a church that gets the government contract to rehabilitate prisoners can run a want ad to hire rehabilitation workers and write, “Jews need not apply” in the ad. They can hire only Christians if they want and pay them with the money they get from the federal government. The federal government could never do that itself, but Bush is letting the churches do it.
If all religions got an equal share of federal faith-based contracts, everything might turn out fair enough. But that’s not going to happen. The White House isn’t interested in giving all religions their fair share, and a lot of prisons won’t have much demand for anything other than Christian rehabilitation counseling because of where the prisons are located and who is in the prisons. So over time, opportunities for Jews and other minorities to work in the social services in prison settings will decline. As these faith-based programs are implemented in non-prison settings, the Jews will be shoved out there, too. People who think there are too many Jewish psychologists and social workers will someday be able to look back at the Bush administration as the one that forced the Jews out.
Jews have experienced this sort of thing before. They used to be excluded from schools and professions and jobs and contracts. So they built their own universities and hospitals and companies, and they struggled to gain political influence so they could make it illegal to discriminate against them or any other minority group. They succeeded, and now Jews are accepted in every walk of life, every profession, and every business. Why would President Bush want to change that?