Orthodox Adherence to Religious Doctrine.

I don't agree with the conclusions in this post at the Catholic Mirror of Justice, about a new book on Catholic justices and the establishment clause, but it's short and I think a good reminder to all of us that church doctrine aren't always practiced/believed/adhered to by their denomination's members, irregardless of public role.

Interfaith Alliance Makes Recommendations to Obama on Faith-Based Initiatives.

For Immediate Release

March 9, 2010

Contact: Ari Geller - Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications 202-265-3000

Interfaith Alliance Calls for Quick Implementation of

Recommendations From President’s Advisory Council

Washington, DC –Interfaith Alliance President, Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, issued the following statement today urging the president to move quickly to implement the recommendations of his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Rev. Gaddy was a member of the taskforce charged with making recommendations on the reform of the faith-based office in the White House.

The recommendations made by the advisory council go a long way toward bringing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in line with the Constitution. I have made no secret of my desire to see this office closed, but if it is going to continue, it must do so – and can do so – in a way that respects the boundaries between religion and government.

The ball is in the president’s court now. Until the president takes action, these are only recommendations. Until he takes action, we are still working under the same guidelines used by the Bush Administration which allowed for untold damage to befall the institutions of religion and government. I have urged the administration to implement the recommendations via executive order as soon as possible.

The recommendations presented to the president will not only strengthen the constitutional foundations of the office, they will protect the religious freedom rights of social service beneficiaries, increase transparency, and most importantly, ensure that government money does not flow directly to houses of worship.

Interfaith Alliance celebrates religious freedom by championing individual rights, promoting policies that protect both religion and democracy, and uniting diverse voices to challenge extremism. Founded in 1994, Interfaith Alliance has 185,000 members across the country from 75 faith traditions as well as those without a faith tradition. For more information visit www.interfaithalliance.org.

Fundraising on Fears of Health Care.

In my inbox today, a call for donations from the Catholic Advocate president Deal Hudson. Boy, the health care scare must be good for collections! I'm always talking about how organized and prepared and funded the groups who are fighting to limit women's right to patients' rights are and here is a look at how they round up their resources.

By acting like the new bill will expand federal funding of abortion (a phrase that exists only in their minds: the Hyde amendment specifically - and discriminatorily - limits abortion funding in Medicaid, and the prohibition of funding for abortion in health care for government employees wasn't enacted until 2005), they've got the "pro-life" groups around the country rabid with fear that they're losing their game under our new "socialist" president. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

As women move from private health care plans or as women receive government subsidy for their health care insurance, the new guidelines will require new and excessive payment obstacles for women with plans that cover abortion. Currently 87% of women have plans that cover abortion services. The new health care bill is an enormous set back. It says that women have no right to their own consciences. It says that they can't be trusted to make their own decisions about their families and reproductive health.

It says that women are not equal in society and must be told how to act. Deal Hudson plans to tell them.

Dear Friend,

At Catholic Advocate we are committed to the cause of preserving the Sanctity of Life from conception until natural death. We know that there is an army of Catholics working tirelessly at the local level, devoting prayer and action to saving the lives of millions of children per year. We believe it is our mission to provide a vibrant community where those on the ground can get up-to-the minute information on the impact of their work in Washington and on a national level. We also believe that it is our mission to provide a strong, national voice to those who understand how important it is to preserve the lives of the most innocent in our society. Faithful Catholics MUST speak out and be heard on candidates, on issues, on legislation...and on their Church!

Our mission needs your support. In order to be effective advocates and to provide quality resources for grassroots Catholic activists, we count on the generosity of our members and supporters.

Your online donation of $25, $50, $100 or $500 will help us grow to become the resource and voice the Catholic grassroots community deserves - the resource that will help committed Catholics to actively participate in the political process and help them support elected officials and policies that remain consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE RIGHT NOW!

Your donation goes to support strong initiatives that are bringing Catholic issues to the forefront in Washington DC and in our own Catholic hierarchy. Just this week, Catholic Advocate kicked off a major pro-life push that, when accomplished, will provide grassroots pro-life advocates with the financial and personal support they so desperately need.

On Monday, Catholic Advocate called upon the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to establish a National Collection for Life. On Monday, Catholic Advocate President Deal W. Hudson and Vice President Matt Smith delivered a personal letter to Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities and Bishop Kevin Farrell (Dallas), Chairman of the Committee on National Collections, asking that the USCCB dedicate monies received in church collections the Sunday before the annual March for Life to national pro-life activities. This collection would provide a huge financial boost to grassroots pro-life efforts nationwide by expanding the resources of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities. This will open up fantastic opportunities to promote the sanctity of life at all stages.

Without the help of our community, such an initiative is not possible. DONATE TODAY to be part of a bright future!

Sincerely,

Deal W. Hudson, President, Catholic Advocate

Forced Feedings: The Bishops and Artificial Nutrition and Hydration.

Judith Graham at the Seattle Times has a great article today on the Catholic Bishops' latest dictatorial health care guideline - that the church decides when patients are removed from (or added to) artificial nutrition and hydration, not the patients. Graham writes:

The new directive, more definitive than previous church teachings, also appears to apply broadly to any patient with a chronic illness who has lost the ability to eat or drink, including victims of strokes and people with advanced dementia.

Catholic medical institutions are bound to honor the bishops' directive, issued late last year, as they do church teachings on abortion and birth control. Officials are weighing how to interpret the guideline in various circumstances.

What happens, for example, if a patient's advance directive, which expresses that individual's end-of-life wishes, conflicts with a Catholic medical center's religious obligations?

Gaetjens, 65, said she did not know of the bishops' position until recently and finds it difficult to accept.

"It seems very authoritarian," said the Evanston, Ill., resident. "I believe people's autonomy to make decisions about their own health care should be respected."

Part of the reason the Catholic church gets away with making these decisions for patients is because so few know how Catholic health care is regulated, by the church. About the history of this new policy on artificial nutrition and hydration, the case of Terri Schiavo is cited, an event that I would say is one of the primary roots of the church's recent restrictions:

The guideline addresses the cases of people such as Terri Schiavo, a Catholic woman who lived for 15 years in a persistent vegetative state, without consciousness of her surroundings. In a case that inspired a national uproar, Schiavo died five years ago, after her husband won a court battle to have her feeding tube removed over the objections of her parents.

The directive's goal is to respect human life, but some bioethicists are skeptical.

"I think many [people] will have difficulty understanding how prolonging the life of someone in a persistent or permanent vegetative state respects the patient's dignity," said Dr. Joel Frader, head of academic pediatrics at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago and professor of medical humanities at Northwestern University.

snip

The church's view is that giving food and water through a feeding tube is not a medical intervention but basic care, akin to keeping the patient clean and turned to prevent bedsores, he said.

Pope John Paul II articulated the principle in a 2004 speech, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an arm of the Vatican, expanded on it in a 2007 statement.

The new guideline incorporates those positions in Directive 58 of the U.S. bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.

There are several important exceptions. For one, if a person is actively dying of an underlying medical condition, such as advanced diabetes or cancer, inserting a feeding tube is not required.

"When a patient is drawing close to death from an underlying progressive and fatal condition, sometimes measures that provide artificial nutrition and hydration become excessively burdensome," said Erica Laethem, a director of clinical ethics at Resurrection Health Care, Chicago's largest Catholic health-care system.

A second exception has to do with bodily discomfort. If infection develops repeatedly at the site of the feeding tube, for instance, artificial nutrition and hydration can be refused or discontinued, Catholic ethicists agree.

A third exception is allowed when inserting or maintaining a feeding tube becomes "excessively burdensome" for a patient.

Under traditional Catholic teachings, patients may refuse medical interventions when anticipated burdens outweigh potential benefits.

"Decisions are made case by case," and that will continue, said Ron Hamel, senior director of ethics at the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

Of particular concern is whether Catholic medical centers will honor an advance directive stating broadly that a person does not want a feeding tube inserted.

Compassion & Choices, a group that supports the right of dying people to end their lives, suggested the potential for conflict is significant.

"Now, [Catholic] hospitals and nursing homes have no choice but to enforce Catholic doctrine universally over patient wishes," the group's president, Barbara Coombs Lee, wrote on her blog.

But most ethicists said they do not see a significant problem. Disagreements, they say, usually can be resolved by discussing people's end-of-life concerns, such as fear of being abandoned, fear of living in pain or fear of becoming entirely dependent on others.

It is rare for people to be very specific about their wishes.

"I have never seen an advance directive that says, 'If I am in a persistent vegetative state, I ask that you withdraw food and water,' " Laethem said.

The bishops' guidelines specify that patients' "advance directives are to be followed, so long as they do not contradict Catholic teachings," said John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center. How those teachings will be interpreted has yet to be resolved.

Heritage Foundation Finds Religious Tolerance on President's Day.

I subscribe to The Morning Bell, a daily email publication by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. Always good to know what ahistorical, revisionist work they're up to. Usually I'm rightly disdainful of most of the shit they post and rant about. But today, I'm happily surprised to say, they got it just about right:

First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen

This season’s snow falls and Snowpocalypse presents a great opportunity to remember our president who also suffered through the cold to save the Republic.

Happy William Henry Harrison Day! No wait. That is not right.Failing to wear a coat in cold weather is not the same asdefeating the British during a blizzard.

The third Monday in February has come to be known—wrongly—as President’s Day. But, this is not a day to celebrate every president in our Nation’s history: like one who served only a month in office. This is the day that we celebrate the man who led America to victory in the War for Independence, who was instrumental in the creation of our Constitution, and whose character forever shaped the executive branch. We celebrate George Washington. That’s why it’s Washington’s Birthday; not President’s day.

What makes George Washington a great president, worthy of such celebration, and example to all other presidents? In short, he was committed to the principles of the American Founding. Liberty, Natural Rights, Equality, Religious Liberty, Economic Opportunity, the Rule of Law, Constitutionalism, Self-government, National Independence: these are the truths that George Washington held.

Matthew Spalding, in his latest book We Still Hold These Truths, explains each of these first principles in depth and often points to Washington as an exemplar practitioner. For instance, Spalding points to an important series of letters to different religious congregations as an example Washington’s commitment to the principle of religious liberty. In a letter to a congregation of Jewish people, one of the most persecuted religious minoritiesin all history, Washington explains:

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Washington understood that citizenship did not require professing particular religious doctrines. Nor does the possession of rights depend upon one’s membership in a certain race or social class.

Not all presidents are George Washington. But all presidents—and all Americans—can and should dedicate themselves to preserving American’s First Principles.

Beck, Textbooks, and the "Wall of Separation."

I wrote last week about the fake historian David Barton who was called on for testimony during the Texas Board of Education hearings to discuss the writing of the textbooks that will not only be used in Texas but across the country.

Turns out that Barton's got bigger ears to fill than just the Texas School Board's. Glenn Beck who has been scheming up a conspiracy-laden next "great awakening," called "The Plan," set to be kicked off in DC on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, draws on Barton's ahistorical accounts of the US founding. Here's a segment from Keith Olberman's show that account's not only Barton's rewriting of history but Beck's plans for our nation's next 100 years.

In tomorrow's New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto has a story that looks at the battle over the soul's of the Founding Fathers and how the Texas School Board and affiliated organizations (the Legal Right) work to establish that not only was the country founded on Christian principles but that the US' laws are Biblical in origin. Barton makes an appearance, below. In the article, Shorto writes that like last year's battle over "intelligent design," this year's battle over the religious birth of the nation has a long history:

The cultural roots of the Texas showdown may be said to date to the late 1980s, when, in the wake of his failed presidential effort, the Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition partly on the logic that conservative Christians should focus their energies at the grass-roots level. One strategy was to put candidates forward for state and local school-board elections — Robertson’s protégé, Ralph Reed, once said, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members than one president and no school-board members” — and Texas was a beachhead. Since the election of two Christian conservatives in 2006, there are now seven on the Texas state board who are quite open about the fact that they vote in concert to advance a Christian agenda. “They do vote as a bloc,” Pat Hardy, a board member who considers herself a conservative Republican but who stands apart from the Christian faction, told me. “They work consciously to pull one more vote in with them on an issue so they’ll have a majority.”

snip

The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

On Barton, Shorto writes:

The other nonacademic expert, David Barton, is the nationally known leader of WallBuilders, which describes itself as dedicated to “presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage.” Barton has written and lectured on the First Amendment and against separation of church and state. He is a controversial figure who has argued that the U.S. income tax and the capital-gains tax should be abolished because they violate Scripture (for the Bible says, in Barton’s reading, “the more profit you make the more you are rewarded”) and who pushes a Christianity-first rhetoric. When the U.S. Senate invited a Hindu leader to open a 2007 session with a prayer, he objected, saying: “In Hindu [sic], you have not one God, but many, many, many, many, many gods. And certainly that was never in the minds of those who did the Constitution, did the Declaration when they talked about Creator.”

In his recommendations to the Texas school board, Barton wrote that students should be taught the following principles which, in his reading, derive directly from the Declaration of Independence: “1. There is a fixed moral law derived from God and nature. 2. There is a Creator. 3. The Creator gives to man certain unalienable rights. 4. Government exists primarily to protect God-given rights to every individual. 5. Below God-given rights and moral laws, government is directed by the consent of the governed.”

Social conservatives have long known that the best way to shape the future tone of the country is through Christian schools (and universities, targeting particularly the medical and legal fields) that instill respect for and adherence to God's laws.

My first reaction to the need to paint the founding fathers as Christian is the question: So what if they were? As a necessarily "living" document, the Constitution should be interpreted to reflect contemporary society and technological, social and scientific advancements. But as Shorto notes, even the term "living document" has been eradicated from text books:

To give an illustration simultaneously of the power of ideology and Texas’ influence, Barber told me that when he led the social-studies division at Prentice Hall, one conservative member of the board told him that the 12th-grade book, “Magruder’s American Government,” would not be approved because it repeatedly referred to the U.S. Constitution as a “living” document. “That book is probably the most famous textbook in American history,” Barber says. “It’s been around since World War I, is updated every year and it had invented the term ‘living Constitution,’ which has been there since the 1950s. But the social conservatives didn’t like its sense of flexibility. They insisted at the last minute that the wording change to ‘enduring.’ ” Prentice Hall agreed to the change, and ever since the book — which Barber estimates controlled 60 or 65 percent of the market nationally — calls it the “enduring Constitution.”

I was born and raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. My grandparents were Mennonite and their story and that of Martin Harnish, our ancestor who was recruited by William Penn, along with other Anabaptist families (Amish and Mennonite) to come to America in the early 1700s, is the perfect illustration of the importance of separation of church and state. The Radical Reformation bred a hostile environment for those in Switzerland and Germany who did not ascribe to the beliefs of the state-ordained church. They were killed and tortured for their faith for centuries. A ticket to the frontiers of what would soon be called Pennsylvania saved my ancestors from continued persecution.

Today, the Amish and to some extent the Mennonites live outside society, protected from governmental discrimination by the Establishment Clause and the "separation of church and state."

One can only wonder how non-evangelical or non-fundamentalist Christian Americans feel about a particular "Christian" history being taught at their public, federally-funded schools. It is this sort of discrimination against individual religious conscience that "separation of church and state" is meant to prevent. And yet, it is this sort of discrimination that the Texas Board of Education and other related groups seek to perpetrate.

Proposition 8: How Many Souls Have You Saved?

Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal's "Law Blog" quips that while little should be happening in the Proposition 8 case in California at the moment - the trial has ended, the post-trial brief isn't due until the end of the month - there's still a lot happening in the case.

Not only have supporters of the law gone bonkers over reports that the judge is gay (perhaps threatening any public support gains the case could have made 'cause, you know, those gays stick together) but the Alliance Defense Fund is now screaming that supporters of "traditional" marriage are being discriminated against for their religion:

One of the lawyers handling the case for the defendants (that is, defending the constitutionality of Prop. 8) sent us a note recently attacking the plaintiffs’ approach in the case. Specifically, Brian Raum, the head of marriage litigation for the Alliance Defense Fund, has accused the plaintiffs and their lead lawyers, David Boies and Ted Olson, of unfairly attacking religion.

In an email, Raum wrote to us:

As one of the attorneys defending California’s marriage amendment, I’ve been uniquely privileged to be at trial in federal court over [recent] weeks. As the proceedings unfolded, though, something became perfectly clear that can only be described as outrageous. This lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the voter-enacted state amendment protecting marriage. But the plaintiffs, who want to redefine marriage, have focused unabashedly on a systematic attack of orthodox religious beliefs.

The defenders of Prop 8 have been standing on two feeble legs, really: they claim that the vote to define marriage as only between a man and a woman was a democratic process; and that the state has an interest in protecting "traditional" marriage. While the first premise may be true, huge amounts of church money (protected from disclosure by the government's lobbying laws and tax-exempt status for churches) ensured that the proposition passed by 52%. That "traditional" ideas of marriage are defensible has proven a more difficult case to make. Everything from the need for procreation to arguments that homosexuals are not monogamous has been thrown up as justification for a "defense" of heterosexual marriage.

What the defendants tried hard to stay away from during the trial were overtly religious arguments for same sex marriage, fearing that the Establishment Clause could be called on to disprove their arguments. Same sex marriage, they claimed, is a moral wrong, not a religious one.

Yet the overtly Christian Alliance Defense Fund was started in 1994 by the likes of Campus Crusade's Bill Bright and Focus on the Family's James Dobson in order to inhibit the legal rights of non-Fundamentalist Christians. They've made an art out of claiming that individual rights are "religious opression," even if those rights in no way impact the lives of others.

As the cornerstone of what I call the Legal Right (similar in purpose to the Religious Right and the Medical Right), ADF is a well-funded, savvy, highly effective force in law today. Their founding principle, that religious freedom is defined as tolerance by society of their particular religious proselytizing, is neither sweet nor benign.

When you define religious freedom as a one-sided demand that all others tolerate your proselytizing (because your faith is right and others need to be converted), any resistant non-believer becomes opposition to your goal of saving souls. Theologically, fundamentalism is designed to measure a believer's chances at heavenly afterlife by how he's lived (though a little deathbed salvation can fix that) and how many he has converted. It's this work to convert - to "reform" the gay, to make chaste the whore, to assert God's laws on society - that ADF is after.

From abstinence education to school prayer, from ahistorical text books to ten commandments statues in court houses, the primary goal is to teach the word of God - a very specific God - and to win all of society into that faith. Religious freedom, in this frame, doesn't mean freedom to believe as one's conscience dictates - no Christian then would need the ten commandments in a courthouse or to be kept from condoms - but freedom to spread that view either by conversion or imposition of laws unchecked.

It is the intolerance demonstrated by religious forces and their desire to convert and govern that Proposition 8 most highlights, not a greater need for tolerance of religion.

Legal Right: "Separation of Church and State" Deniers.

We're all quite familiar with the term Religious Right, the name given to primarily Catholic, evangelical and fundamentalist organizations that work to legislate conservative, discriminatory "pro-life," and "traditional" (whatever that means) values in the US. Lately, Kathryn Tucker and others have identified what they term the Medical Right, conservative Christian medical organizations that work for the same purposes in the medical industry.

But in this assignation of influential powers the Right has built over the last 40 years, we would be remiss to not include the Legal Right, dedicated to working the courts to keep laws that ascribe to one particular interpretation of faith on the books.

Beliefnet has a fine little feature called "Lynn v. Sekulow," the principle characters, pitted against one another in e-dialogue, being Rev. Barry Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the Pat Robertson-funded American Center for Law and Justice.

Here's the latest from Sekulow, who side-steps Lynn's calling for the Obama administration to reform Bush's faith-based initiatives (churches do good things!), and delves into a fine bit of disingenuous rationalizing (and ACLU bashing) on a lawsuit that would allow a court judge to continue to display the ten commandments in his courtroom:

For nearly a decade now, the ACLU has been trying to silence Judge DeWeese's expression of his legal philosophy. That philosophy, which holds that a society's legal system must rest on moral absolutes as opposed to moral relativism, and that abandonment of moral absolutes leads to societal breakdown and chaos, is the same philosophy that was held by the founders of this nation.

To say, as the ACLU does in this case, that a judge may not espouse such a view because it is 'religious' is to adopt an erroneous and timeworn interpretation of the First Amendment that is not based on the words, the history or the Founders' understanding of the Constitution.

At issue is a poster designed to illustrate Judge DeWeese's legal philosophy. The poster features two columns of principles or precepts intended to show the contrast between legal philosophies based on moral absolutes and moral relativism. The judge used a version of the Ten Commandments as symbolic of moral absolutes, and a set of statements from sources such as the Humanist Manifesto as symbolic of moral relativism.

In a our initial brief filed in December, we argue that the ACLU lacks legal standing in the case, that the lower court erred in determining that the display violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and violates articles of the Ohio Constitution, and contends that the Judge's display is protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

The brief contends that Judge DeWeese's display is constitutional: "Neither DeWeese's discussion of the contrast between legal philosophies based on moral absolutes as opposed to moral relativism, nor his use of the Decalogue as a means to illustrate that contrast bespeak a constitutionally problematic religious purpose," the brief argues. "Moreover, a reasonable observer of the poster would view the poster as a statement about legal philosophy, morality, and ethics, not theology or religion."

Emphasis above is mine. Sekulow is talking about a poster of the ten commandments! And he is hedging the obvious in a number of ways: Society (guided by the notoriously un-nuanced media) tends to view religion as a benign good or as an intrusive evil, either one but primarily the former. Sekulow is disingenuous in arguing that the judge's objective is not to impose religious laws (absolute, not relative) but to present a moral, ethical guide. He's posting the ten commandments! By appealing to our ideas of benign faith, Sekulow hopes to get God in the back door. It's like calling creationism "intelligent design" and convincing the school board that it's a theory just like evolution.

However obvious the objective of these misleadingly-named organizations (who could oppose law and justice? defending "life"? supporting families?), we fail to counter them appropriately, by smoking out their theocratic intentions.

But the real point Sekulow makes in the above post is that he is a "separation of church and state" denier, one of the many theocratically-inclined who base their need to enforce their version of God's laws on the country via an elaborately constructed but ahistorical version of American's founding, its Constitution and writers, and American "traditions". They have no room for other faiths, other lifestyles, other choices. That is, after all, what absolute means.

The great irony is that Sekulow and other Legal Right organizations don't acknowledge that their proclamation of faith is only protected by the separation of church and state. Undermining that separation is all well and good for them until a theocracy other than their own rises to power. How would they read the constitution then?

Calling on Obama to Address Bush's Faith-Based Initiatives.

In the wake of the National Prayer Breakfast this week, the group Citizens Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) is calling for Obama to address the faith-based initiatives started by the Bush administration.

Sarah Posner wrote yesterday at Religion Dispatches:

Obama had made three pledges: to end the exemption allowing federal grantees to discriminate in hiring based on religion; to require houses of worship receiving federal grants to form separate non-profits so that federal funds would not be directed to sectarian organizations; and to put in place oversight and monitoring of proselytizing by federal grantees.

As president, Obama decided instead to address instances of employment discrimination on a "case-by-case basis" and to only recommend but not require separate non-profits. The administration has not unveiled any plans to beef up oversight of proselytizing by grantees.

At the National Prayer Breakfast Obama claimed, that his administration had "turned the faith-based initiative around," but an article at Americans United for Separation of Church and State notes:

...Leaders of civil rights, civil liberties and religious groups say the president has failed to correct Bush-era policies.

“I was surprised and disappointed to hear President Obama suggest that the faith-based initiative has somehow been ‘turned around,’” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “In fact, in all significant ways, the Obama faith-based initiative right now is the same as the Bush faith-based initiative.

“The Bush rules and regulations are all still in place,” Lynn continued. “Administration officials have failed to safeguard the vital constitutional boundary between church and state, and they have not restored the damage to civil rights law.”

Among the things Americans United and CARD are calling for:

• Revoke a June 2007 legal memo issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that asserts that a 1993 religious freedom law gives religious groups the right to take tax funds and still discriminate on religious grounds in hiring. This interpretation, the joint letter asserts, is “erroneous and threatens core civil rights and religious freedom protections.”

• Issue policies making it clear that social-services providers must give proper notice to beneficiaries of their religious liberty rights and access to alternative secular providers.

• Require that houses of worship and other religious institutions that infuse religion into every program create separate corporations for the purpose of providing secular government-funded social services.

The members of CARD are religious and secular organizations who believe strongly that only separation of church and state will guarantee religious tolerance.