This Week in God

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 11:40 AM on July 19, 2008.

First up from the God machine this week is a poll that didn’t get a lot of attention, but was actually pretty important.

A Quinnipiac University national poll released on Thursday covered quite a bit of ground when it came to “culture war” issues, and perhaps most importantly given the recent campaign discussion, produced some interesting data on faith-based federal funding.

American voters support 53 - 41 percent giving money to faith-based organizations to help them run social programs. But voters say 77 - 16 percent groups which receive federal funds cannot discriminate by hiring only members of their own faith.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, that 41% of Americans don’t want faith-based groups to get social-service grants is a surprisingly high number. There’s a perception, which I’ll admit to buying into on occasion, that these kinds of partnerships and contracts — which have been around for years — are overwhelmingly popular. A poll like this suggests there remains some discomfort about mixing church and state, which I find encouraging.

But that second part of the question is even more striking.

The NYT’s Bob Herbert, in a misguided attack on Barack Obama recently, argued that Obama is “promising not just to maintain the Bush program of investing taxpayer dollars in religious-based initiatives, but to expand it.” That’s simply not true — Obama’s policy is premised on key safeguards that Bush’s program intentionally sought to remove.



And at the top of this list was religious discrimination. Obama believes groups that receive public funds can’t discriminate when hiring employees to do the social service work. John McCain, just a week ago, said the exact opposite, insisting that faith-based organizations should get funding and discriminate in hiring with tax-dollars.

So, on this issue, 77% of Americans prefer Obama’s approach, while 16% prefer McCain’s.

Also from The God Machine this week:

* More religious trouble for McCain: “A Catholic group has written to John McCain to ask him to remove Deal Hudson from the Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee because of allegations that, in 1994, Hudson solicited sex from an 18-year-old woman who was a student in one of his classes at Fordham University. ”



* Guns & God: “An Oklahoma church canceled a controversial gun giveaway for teenagers at a weekend youth conference. Windsor Hills Baptist had planned to give away a semiautomatic assault rifle until one of the event’s organizers was unable to attend. The church’s youth pastor, Bob Ross, said it’s a way of trying to encourage young people to attend the event.”

* As if the dispute in South Carolina weren’t enough, now license-plate controversies are spreading to Kentucky: “The official Kentucky state motto is ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall.’ But that’s not the slogan that Gov. Steve Beshear is proposing for a new alternative license plate. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, Beshear will push for legislation next year authorizing a special ‘In God We Trust’ plate for vehicles in the Commonwealth.”

Tagged as: religion