Over the two-year life of President Barack Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFBNP), the most controversial aspects of former President George Bush’s initiative have remained in place. Although Obama had promised in a July 2008 campaign speech that he would rid the OFBNP of two of its most pressing constitutional problems — allowing faith-based organizations receiving federal dollars to discriminate in hiring, and allowing federal money to be dispersed directly into houses of worship — he has done neither. Indeed, many of the evangelical leaders whose approval Obama sought during his run for the White House opposed those reforms, making their feelings known to campaign staff shortly after his stump speech.
In the two years since the OFBNP launch, church-state separation and civil liberties advocates, acting individually and through the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) have repeatedly pushed Obama to stop funding organizations with discriminatory hiring practices, as well as ending the practice known as direct funding, which permits taxpayer money to flow directly to houses of worship, rather than requiring them to establish a separate nonprofit entity. Instead, on the hiring discrimination issue, Obama said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would review instances of alleged discrimination on a “case-by-case basis,” and has merely encouraged recipients to set up separate nonprofits.
Using federal dollars to hire applicants chosen according to discriminatory practices is “a blatant violation of fairness and religious liberty, and the president knows this,” said Sean Faircloth, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, also a CARD member. In addition, “If religious organizations wish to help their community with US taxpayer dollars, we believe it’s only right that they be required to create a separate, non-religious entity for that purpose — one that would be open to government oversight…. Churches and other religious groups are free to do what they want with their own money, but once they receive federal funds, they should be required to operate by the same laws as any other charity.”
