The faith-based initiative was a fraud that was shamelessly abused for partisan ends.
Last week, the White House sponsored a major national conference on “faith-based” funding, featuring a speech by President George W. Bush. Then on Saturday, the president devoted his weekly radio chat to the same topic.
Touting his “new approach called ‘compassionate conservatism’” and praising the “armies of compassion” supposedly empowered by his initiative, he said, “Because of you, I’m confident that the progress we have made over the past eight years will continue. Because of you, countless souls have been touched and lives have been healed.”
Bush cronies took up the faith-based call as well. Former White House Faith Czar Jim Towey took to the op-ed page of The Washington Post to insist the initiative is “transforming lives” and to demand that our presidential candidates promise to continue it. Towey blasted “zealots about church-state separation” who “say that it goes too far and should be shut down.”
Well, speaking as one of those zealots, Jim, I think you’ve got a truckload of nerve to appear in public on this topic. I guess Towey thinks we’ve all forgotten the dismal record he and others in the Bush administration rolled up on this matter.
According to David Kuo, a former top staffer in the White House faith-based office, Bush administration figures never had any serious commitment to helping the poor and they used the faith-based office primarily as a partisan political toy.
Kuo, in his 2006 tell-all book Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, confesses that he and Towey hatched a scheme to hold faith-based conferences in congressional districts where Republican incumbents were in political trouble in the 2002 elections.
The events would showcase the Republican candidates as friends of the disadvantaged and hold out the prospect of federal funding to clergy and charity officials. White House political operatives loved the idea. The scheme was carried out and 19 of 20 targeted GOP candidates won. (Americans United for Separation of Church and State exposed the shameless stunt when it happened, but Kuo’s book was the first confirmation from an administration participant.)
Kuo said similar tactics were used in 2003 and 2004, with a dozen faith-based conferences held in every significant battleground state.
In his book, Kuo concedes that there were never any new federal funds to actually implement new faith-based programs, and the prospective federal aid dangled before the clergy and church-based charities never materialized for the vast majority of conference attendees.
That, of course, didn’t stop the administration from lying about the initiative. Bush once asked Kuo for figures on how much new money the administration had given to faith-based groups so Bush could cite the figure in remarks to a gathering of black clergy.
When Kuo said the answer was “virtually nothing,” the president decided to apply some creative math. Bush chose to go with the figure of 8 billion dollars! That’s wasn’t new money handed out to new faith-based groups; that was the total amount of federal social spending that groups could apply for.
Said Bush, “Eight billion. That’s what we’ll tell them. Eight billion in new funds for faith-based groups.”
Well, it’s an election year and, guess what, here are Bush, Towey and their allies out holding conferences and selling faith-based snake oil again.
We at Americans United have repeatedly argued that Bush’s faith-based initiative undercut basic civil rights and civil liberties protections. That’s why it failed in Congress, and Bush had to implement it through executive orders.
But the failures of the initiative go beyond constitutional and public policy disaster. The initiative was also a fraud that was shamelessly abused for partisan ends.
This isn’t “compassionate conservatism,” it’s cynical posturing and political sleight-of-hand. To see Bush, Towey and company still running this con game is truly deplorable.
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