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Obama rejected that approach forcefully in a campaign speech last July in Zanesville, Ohio, during which he laid out his plans for a revamped faith-based effort. "We need all hands on deck," Obama said, declaring that the problem during the Bush years wasn't that the right or wrong organizations were applying for grants but that federal funds for social services had dwindled considerably. With today's announcement and the establishment of the council, Obama has also made clear that he intends to involve the religious community in issues beyond federal funding, including more traditional concerns like religious liberty...
...ambitious task down a path studded with political mines. Although partnerships between faith-based organizations and government have existed for decades and were reinvigorated during the Clinton Administration, the issue became a partisan football during Bush's time in office. Even some of the faith-based initiative's earliest supporters - including Republican Congressman Mark Souder of Indiana and former office director John DiIulio - strongly criticized the way the Bush White House handled the effort and cut funds for social services. "The Bush Administration pushed hard on the things that created the most controversy and made it look more controversial than...
...those controversial points was the question of whether faith-based groups that receive government funding should be allowed to hire only individuals who share their religious beliefs. Early in Bush's first term, he signed a series of Executive Orders exempting religious organizations from nondiscrimination laws...
...have not heard from anybody to suggest that the President is moving away from the commitment he made in Zanesville to clean up the constitutional problems with the faith-based initiative," says Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. "Other people claim he's moving. But that's not what I'm hearing...
Another of Obama's Zanesville promises will pose an enormous bureaucratic challenge to his faith-based operation. "We will also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work," he vowed in July. It was a pledge Bush made as well in the early days of the faith-based initiative, insisting that "results" would be the only criterion by which programs were judged. But measuring the effectiveness of programs that receive government money turns out to be a monumental task, and the Bush Administration never did implement a widespread assessment program. In the current economic climate...