Faith-based farce

It seems George W. Bush’s “armies of compassion” have become Barack Obama’s armies of contraception. 

Many were surprised that when President Obama entered the White House he didn’t close the faith-based office his predecessor had created. As the man who led that office for over four years under Bush, I think I now know why.

Indeed, Obama telegraphed his intentions from the start. The new administration wasn’t in place a month before he re-launched the initiative and declared that a priority of his faith-based office would be to “look at how we support women and children, address teenage pregnancy, and reduce the need for abortion.”

From day one he set his administration on a course to make contraception another federal entitlement, and to utilize his faith-based office as a political outreach shop. He even appointed a Pentecostal preacher who was the president’s “director of religious affairs” on the campaign trail (talk about audacity of appointment!). Of late, the White House faith-based office has been scrambling to line up religious leaders, many themselves the recipients of millions of dollars in federal grants and TARP funds, willing to vouch for the president’s faith-friendliness. On the day of the “accommodation” announcement the faith-based office staff conducted the political equivalent of an “altar call” to secure such support.

Exercises in damage control are nothing new to the office. Six weeks before the mid-term elections in 2010 it organized an Oval Office conference call for the president to mobilize thousands of faith-based and community leaders in support of the very same unpopular health care law passed six months earlier. Had not POLITICO listened in on the call, the public would never have known about it. It was as shameless an exploitation of the faith-based office as any Bush critic could have imagined.

Had I proposed to Bush an Oval conference call with faith leaders to galvanize support for the Iraq War, he would have fired me on the spot.  In contrast, he actually directed me to meet with the most vocal critics of his faith-based initiative, and so I met with the leaders of the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and Democrat senators, congressmen, and governors. 

But the Obama faith-based office doesn’t work that way. If you aren’t seen as an ally on an issue, then you are an enemy. The administration now admits it made no serious effort to consult with key evangelicals, Catholic bishops, Orthodox rabbis and educational institutions like the one I lead, to understand better our concerns. Had there been an effort to provide a meaningful “conscience clause” in the so-called accommodation, there would not be the uproar that persists.

For our part, little Ave Maria University will not comply with the federal government’s mandate to provide abortion-inducing drugs and birth control pills as part of our health plan. No accounting charade can change the fact that the premiums we pay, which represent 95% of the plan’s cost, would most certainly pay for the “free” services we would be obliged to offer through our insurer.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty today is filing a lawsuit on our behalf in the federal court for the Middle District of Florida to protect our rights of conscience. We will discontinue providing health insurance before we knuckle under to a governmental requirement that alters our institution’s very identity.

It is sad that the White House office which should be the most sensitive to religious rights, is in fact leading the stampede to trample them.
President Obama should clean house in his faith-based office, or better yet, close it. It has become a farce, and no one is laughing.

Towey served as President George W. Bush’s director of Faith-Based Initiatives and is the incoming president of Ave Maria University.

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