Obama is playing to the crowd. Centrist instead of Liberal (On, I forgot, it’s Progressive.) Just as he did to the troops he addressed. It would have been mean spirited to remind troops who have lost lives and limbs that the war was a meaningless, financially dissastrous waste of men/women and money.

So, the most likely tack is the Evolution/Creationist_Intelligent Design_Hear both sides of arguments people. Use the Consitution to protect our Enlightenment values, not our incorrectly stated original American Christian values.

For a generation the Republicans outflanked the Democrats with religious conservatives and now the Democrats are in the “soft on atheism” hole. I imagine this dynamic will be with us for a while. But the slow increase of people of no religion will eventually end this dynamic.

“For all practical purposes,” Judge Pratt said, “the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional, and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates.”

I’m with Miko. The OFBCI was set up with all the wording it needed to prevent abusive FBOs from getting their mitts on Federal dosh. What the OFBCI needs now is the teeth to enforce that wording, to give proselytizing programs like Colson’s the boot.

Obama wants to harness the OFBCI to help soup kitchens and other local community groups establish themselves and keep running, especially through the economic downturn. If the manpower of Church groups can be harnessed to help unfortunate people, I’m all for it. As Matthew Parris said after visiting Africa, “Only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it.”

Incidentally, it’s worth pointing out that you have some of the same problems (without the church-state connections) under a secular-but-government-run program. I sometimes feel that our anti-poverty programs are in fact anti-poor-people, since they seem designed to gain authoritarian control over the poor through bribes (e.g., you can use food stamp money to buy tomatoes but not to buy a tomato plant, you need to report all work and certain jobs can jeopardize welfare status thus creating a poverty trap, etc.). Seeing as the U.S. currently spends more than $50,000 per welfare recipient (and clearly no where near that much is actually getting to the recipients themselves), the faith-based initiative is just the latest example of corruption in an industry designed to help sinecure-seeking bureaucrats while hiding behind the noble illusion of helping the poor.