"Obama's Faithful Flock" The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090803/posner/print

Obama's Faithful Flock

by SARAH POSNER

This article appeared in the August 3, 2009 edition of The Nation.
July 15, 2009

"When President Barack Obama announced the appointment of Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), to lead the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), many progressive activists were alarmed. Kelley, a Catholic social justice advocate who has said that abortion is a social ill to be combated along with torture, poverty and war, is on record supporting restrictions on abortion access and has refused to challenge church doctrine prohibiting abortion and birth control.

Writing in Salon, Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for Choice, lauded Kelley as "a distinguished advocate of healthcare reform and the rights of poor people" who "has much to offer in government--but not at HHS." Jon O'Brien, current president of Catholics for Choice, stated publicly, "We need those working in HHS to rely on evidence-based methods to reduce the need for abortion...unfortunately, as seen from her work at CACG, Ms. Kelley does not fit the bill."

For progressives, secularists and feminists, Kelley's appointment is the latest in a series of alarming developments at the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFBNP), which oversees a network of faith-based and neighborhood partnership centers at eleven federal agencies (including the one Kelley will head). During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would expand George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives because "the challenges we face today...are simply too big for government to solve alone." But he also promised to end the constitutional violations of Bush's faith-based programs by requiring that federal dollars that go to churches, temples and mosques "only be used on secular programs" and by forbidding programs that accept federal money from proselytizing or discriminating against people in hiring on the basis of religion.

Since he has taken office, however, Obama has backtracked or stalled on these pledges. Perhaps more disturbing, Obama's OFBNP, while still a work in progress, is plagued by a lack of transparency and accountability and has seemingly already been exploited as a tool for rewarding religious constituencies with government jobs--exactly the problems that marked Bush's faith-based initiative."

Read the rest: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090803/posner/print

The use of women as political wedge issues for votes is disturbing at best. I am ashamed of my party for contributing to this clear use of the bodies of women and girls as possessions.

When women achieve equal numbers in office we will see this lessen. The abortion issue (and the contraception issue) is male driven. The issue itself is testament to the fact that women are not equal with men in our society.

P.S. I am surprised I only had one response to the article (and one un-recommend when I first posted - why would any democrat un-recommend this article? IS DU becoming anti-choice?

Women's lives are in danger when religious right are assimiliated into government and sway legislation (and money) away from reproductive health care.

Seriously, is there an anti-choice element here at DU?

If Bush had done this this post would be on fire at this point.

Who at DU would do this to a post pointing out anti-choicers in our government?

Someone just recommended it.. Thank you sister/brother pro-choicer for caring.

Sorry I saw this too late to Rec.

Heads up and connect the dots people, because the Obama admin is loaded with fundies AND Goldman Sachs connections.

All which are VIOLATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION!


Obama just put a fundie at the helm of the National Institutes of Health:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=8562062

Our SOS, HRC is a member of an "elite cell" of The Family:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6202847



The United States of Goldman Sachs:

The Great American Bubble Machine
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again

MATT TAIBBIPosted Jul 13, 2009 1:49 PM

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

<snip>

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumercredit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine

It's weird how some good posts are ignored but a lot of garbage posts get K&R's.

The Christofascist movement in our govt. and in our party in particular, is disturbing. Thanks for posting about it.

"The use of women as political wedge issues for votes is disturbing at best."

Unless hillary is doing it, right?

This anti-obama theme seems to repeat over and over that if obama so much as speaks with someone who doesn't agree 100% with your ideology, that means he's 100% against your ideology. If he meets with someone who doesn't support gay marriage, that means obama hates gays. If he appoints someone who isn't pro-choice, that means he hates women and will ban abortion next week. And anybody who dares disagree with such moronic sour grapes BS, is called a kool-aid drinking sycophant.

This stupid shit is a re-run... and people tend to change the station on re-runs.


"The abortion issue (and the contraception issue) is male driven. The issue itself is testament to the fact that women are not equal with men in our society."

You're free to hate and blame men for your problems, but don't expect an avalanche of enthusiastic support patting you on the back for it.

Hell most of the really hardcore anti-choicers I've ever seen are women... but I'm sure that's men's fault too, right?

And I've heard angry neo-feminists scream that it is a woman's issue and men should stay out of it.

So which is it, are men supposed to fix this issue for you, in order for you to be satisfied that equality has been achieved... or are men supposed to get out of the way and let women fix this issue for themselves?

There is so much ridiculous sexist hatred for men masquerading as political activism on this board.

Ignore the unrecs, you'll get them if you're not 100% laudatory of the administration.

Interesting:

"Watchdogs are concerned that, as with Bush's fund, controls are insufficient to ensure constitutional protections, transparency or accountability. "These problems will persist until this administration stops operating under the Bush-era executive orders and regulations that still govern the faith-based programs," says Marge Baker, executive vice president of People for the American Way.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example--where Obama has placed his campaign's Catholic outreach guru, Mark Linton, at the helm of the faith-based center--religious organizations are invited to apply for a variety of housing-related grants. At the Justice Department the faith-based office advertises grants available to faith-based groups to "provide assistance to victims of crime, prisoners and ex-offenders, and women who suffer domestic violence initiatives to target gang violence and at-risk youth."

Moreover, by appointing former campaign staff to faith-based posts, Obama risks the appearance of politicizing the effort, something Bush and Rove notoriously did. "The only way to avoid the appearance is to do it differently," says the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a religious liberty and church-state separation watchdog group. "The White House needs to be reminded of that. They're naïve if they assume that people aren't going to look at that."

Of concern:

"Of the first fifteen advisory council appointments, made February 5, only one was prochoice, and more, including a Catholic and a Southern Baptist, were ardent opponents of legal abortion. Two months later, when the White House filled out the remaining ten appointments, it added prochoice religious voices, but they were not from the ranks of the most prominent activists on abortion, such as representatives of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Opponents of LGBT equality also outnumbered gay-rights proponents, although the administration later added Harry Knox, director of the Faith and Religion Program at the Human Rights Campaign.

Center-right abortion-reduction proponents, however, have had an easier time securing a hearing. When David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and one of the most prominent voices from the evangelical center, complained publicly that Obama was not doing enough to fulfill his pledge to reduce abortions, he immediately received a call from the White House. "I regularly, weekly, get invited to come to the White House for a meeting or to listen or participate in a conference call on a range of things," Gushee told me.

Gushee was the principal author of a 1996 manifesto, The America We Seek: A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern, signed by forty-five religious-right leaders as well as advisory council member Wallis. It posited that it was unlikely Roe v. Wade would be overruled, and called instead for criminalizing doctors who perform abortions (but not "women in crisis"), opening more "crisis pregnancy centers" and passing a constitutional amendment overturning Roe and giving fetuses personhood status. Gushee said recently, "The principles articulated in this statement still reflect my own views."

Reproductive rights activists remain optimistic that Obama will ultimately back a policy that focuses on preventing unintended pregnancies through comprehensive sex education and contraception, along with economic support for women who choose to carry unintended pregnancies to term. The White House's policy discussions on abortion focus on "best practices" for reducing abortion; overturning Roe is off the table. Still, Obama has invited hard-right antichoice organizations like Concerned Women for America into these conversations, as well as advocates of the Pregnant Women Support Act, a bill backed by Democrats for Life and Alexia Kelley. The bill aims to influence pregnant women to "choose life" by bolstering social services for them, but it provides no funding for contraception or sex education."

:-(

Beacool wrote:

Ignore the unrecs, you'll get them if you're not 100% laudatory of the administration.


Wow, this phenomenon at DU is so un-democratic and non-progressive. What has happened here?

looks like we have to live with it :thumbsdown:

More and more religious encroachment until it's driven through everyone's head that religion is literally necessary. Hardly seems to bother many people at all.

Depressing.

It's become a fan club. Most critical posts get unrec'd, even though the Larry Flynt post has over 100 recs. LOL!!!

Either way, it's a good thread. I wasn't aware of who Obama had appointed to the faith based agencies. Then again, why should it be surprising when he had Rick Warren give the invocation at his inauguration.

:eyes:

Come over more often, you are missed.

:pals:

but I'm not a fucking drooling idiot

:hi:

Just wow. This coming from the person who can't stop stomping her feet over Hillary Clinton losing? You have the nerve to call his supporters worhsippers? What would you classify yourself as when it comes to Hillary?

Please, you're the biggest Clinton worshipper this board has ever seen.

This:

"Of the first fifteen advisory council appointments, made February 5, only one was prochoice, and more, including a Catholic and a Southern Baptist, were ardent opponents of legal abortion."

Isn't this peachy?

And this:

"Reproductive rights activists remain optimistic that Obama will ultimately back a policy that focuses on preventing unintended pregnancies through comprehensive sex education and contraception, along with economic support for women who choose to carry unintended pregnancies to term. The White House's policy discussions on abortion focus on "best practices" for reducing abortion; overturning Roe is off the table. "

What gives them this hope? Drugs or Kool-Aid?

My Question here: WHERE IS THE EMPHASIS ON MEN KEEPING IT IN THEIR PANTS? It takes two to conceive. But, in a male defined and male dominated country (the USA) the abortion issue is always on the woman.

If the dems want to continue to make women's right to control their bodies and lives a political issue I want equal time. I want to see:
Penalties for men who have showed lack of will-power to pony up the money it costs to raise a child. At the onset of conception!

"WHERE IS THE EMPHASIS ON MEN KEEPING IT IN THEIR PANTS?"

Funny if someone says to women they should keep their legs together, they're called oppressive evil sexist women haters who are trying to sexually repress women and deny them freedom of their own sexuality.

Yet with seemingly no perception of their own hypocrisy, so called supporters of equality and independence for women, with blame men for the sexual choices women make and demand men support women, as if women where incapable of supporting themselves.

As if when money is involved, somehow super independent strong self-determining women, suddenly become helpless weak and unable to care for themselves without a man supporting them.

" It takes two to conceive. But, in a male defined and male dominated country (the USA) the abortion issue is always on the woman."


So the whole "our bodies our choice" thing is no longer the case?


A man has ZERO to do with weather or not you have a child... ZERO!

Abortion is legal and a woman's choice. If she chooses to have a child, she is responsible for that choice. The man, as you point out, is there only for conception... after that the decision to have a child, and all the expenses that come with having a child, is all HER CHOICE and her's alone.

Why should a man have to pay for your choice? Are women not capable of supporting themselves without a man? Perhaps in a time when women were truly oppressed, unable to work, and not capable of supporting themselves... and if there was no access to contraception, abortion, or adoption... then the idea that a man is obligated to support a woman would hold water. But those days are over.

Responsibility is the price of independence and self-determination.

And with the choice, comes the bill.

Consent to sexual intercourse, is not consent to finance your procreation agenda.

you wrote:

A man has ZERO to do with weather or not you have a child... ZERO!



Hmmm, take biology in HIgh School?


The entire abortion debate revolves around the woman. It takes a man to conceive. The anti-choicers want abortion illegal? Take it to the penis.

"A man has ZERO to do with weather or not you have a child... ZERO!"


"Hmmm, take biology in HIgh School?"


Yeah I did, which is why I know the difference between birth and conception. A man's only biological roll in child production is at conception. The decision to carry that conceived fetus to term, give birth to a child in need of support for 18 years, is the woman's choice, not the man's. So why is a man obligated to pay for the woman's choice to have a child?


"The entire abortion debate revolves around the woman. It takes a man to conceive. The anti-choicers want abortion illegal? Take it to the penis."

Yeah how unreasonable to expect women to be responsible for what happens inside their own bodies... just blame it on a man and hand him the bill.

How can you argue that women are equal and independent, if you also demand men take responsibility for your decisions about what happens in your own body?

the good fight - within our OWN PARTY!!

Terrible it has come to this in the Democratic Party!

Just got another un-recommend.

What to call this aspect of the democratic party: people who would un-recommend a pro-choice article from The Nation:

1. The anti-choicers?
2. The Sycophants?
3. The misogynistic status quo? (Status Quo in that they don't want change for women.)

I pick number 3.

If we HAVE to have them.

They'll make sure everyone is playing fair.

They would be completely immune from accusations of religious favoritism. I would support that.

Whether our President is a theocrat himself or simply foolish enough to think that by sucking up to theocrats he can hold power without a ruinous and potentially irreversible further encroachment of religion into our government, it doesn't much matter, does it?

These guys play for keeps. The pernicious plan here is to creep further into government with sniveling excuses of "ceremonial deism" and "partnerships", which will then be used as precedent to infiltrate further. How many times have we heard that "In God We Trust" on money is proof that we're a religious country? How many times have we been told not to worry about it?

A freezing vagrant with mental problems partially stemming from an abusive religious upbringing shouldn't have to face the only refuge on a snowy night being a church. That's fiendish, and the oft-repeated doe-eyed promises to not proselytize is the bullshit of those faithful who feel that the supernatural truth transcends mere mortal pledges.

There's a reason why religion is kept out of our government: it doesn't play fair. That's not just a tendency of the mindset, it's the HEART AND SOUL OF IT: the "truth" (whichever competing fantastical certainty it might be) needs no explanation, brooks no dissent, and is "better" than any view from any other quarter. Religion in government is a demand for social aristocracy.

This is so deeply wrong on so many levels and to such a degree that anyone who believes in the ethical precept of plurality should hound them back to the churches my taxes sustain.

As for the newfound unrec function that clamps the lid on dissent like this thread, the only thing we can do is be voluble in our alarm ringing.

What a shameful, deeply deceitful bit of moral larceny.

Catholic fundies- evangelical fundies- Islamic fundies- take your pick.

under the bus - why? Who is he trying to please here? Certainly not the vast majority of people who voted for him.

And because of this, and many other reasons, I will never vote for him again. Because I do not vote for pro-lifers - EVER. And in putting a pro-lifer in charge of an office that shouldn't even exist in the first place, Obama has shown he has no respect for the pro-choice voters who voted for him because he pretended to be pro-choice.

more whiny bullshit from another hater.

to pay for abortions.

Under Obama - they can't. Why hasn't Obama undone THAT Bush rule?

It is just pathological how the Obama fan club refuses to hold him accountable for ANYTHING. I thought blindly worhsipping politicians was something only repugs did, until I started coming here.

I didn't know that, it's messed up!!

:(

It is the home of Bigots Wearing Jesus Masks. Satan in a Sunday hat.