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Jewish World Review Feb. 6, 2001 / 13 Shevat, 5761
James Lileks
Of course, for some it's just proof that a long dark night of religious
jackbootery has finally descended. Government grants to Unitarian food
shelves is just the beginning, brother. Soon your daughters' chainmail
chastity belts will clink melodically as they walk, heads down, from Shame
School to their jobs in the Bible Bindery. Crosses will rise over the Post
Office! In every government office, cackling Jesuits with whips will force
civil servants to run the Constitution through the shredder! It's the age of
unreason the left has long predicted. What else could we expect from a man
whose campaign rhetoric clearly warned us all? Just listen to these
fundamentalist pronouncements, and despair:
"Let us put the solutions that faith-based organizations are pioneering
at the very heart of our national strategy for building a better, more just
nation. Many people in the faith-based organizations want their role to be
not exemplary, but strategic; not to be merely a shining anecdote in a
pretty story told by a politician, but to have a seat at the national table
when decisions get made."
Yipes. And here's the scary stuff that should have warned you all.
"Today I give you this pledge: if you elect me President, the voices of
faith-based organizations will be integral to the policies set forth in my
administration."
Good thing he lost the race, eh?
That's right: the quote above was made by Al Gore in May 1999. We
repeat: AL GORE. Back before he picked himself up by the short hairs on his
neck and dragged himself to the left, Gore offered to give federal money to
FBOs.
We pause while some people recalibrate their sense of outrage and begin
to sputter rationales. While they're adjusting, some words from Honest Joe
Lieberman in 1996, back when he still had a reputation to shred:
"The men and women who run faith-based missions for the homeless . . .
recognize, as do the large majority of homeless people themselves, that
missions inspired by religious conviction are able to do a better job
providing for those who have no home. Government cannot solve the problem of
homelessness on its own."
Heresy! Oh, but it gets even sweeter. Who's the leader of the club who
loved those FBOs? Who first proposed the amendment to allow FBOs to bid for
government service? Yes, it was the left's demon du jour, John "Pretty Dang
Close toHitler" Ashcroft. Bradley voted for Ashcroft's proposal. Gore,
Leiberman, Bradley, Ashcroft: all singing from the same page of the hymnal.
So why did Gore get a pass when he pressed the Bible to his chest and
promised the very thing Bush is proposing? Well, Gore's flacks said FBOs
wouldn't "deliver government services," thereby avoiding the entanglement
issue. Since they can define "government services" however they like, it
would render moot any true effort to use FBOs. Except when they produce the
aformentioned "pretty anecdote."
But no liberal voter ever really believed Gore would push for FBO aid.
Oh, he might have signed a watered-down version if it was offered to him,
and had a few juicy riders that legalized baby clone-farms for fetal-tissue
research. Politics is the art of the compromise, after all. But he wouldn't
have brought it up in his first month on the job. He would have been huffing
and puffing for something great and green and global, such as using the
Marines to confiscate genetically-modified popcorn in Botswana.
Bush said it; Bush meant it. You have your choice: the brilliant Gore
who lies to you, or the supposedly dim Bush who does what he says he'd do.
If Bush really wanted to put the knife in, he'd say that this was Gore's
idea in the first place. He's merely doing what all the Dems insisted: he's
adopting Gore's policies in the interests of unity, of healing. Why, Perhaps
Gore would like to be the head of the commission?
Of course not. Gore has a job. He's going to be a journalism professor.
Suggested first lesson: newspaper readers have computers and search engines.
People may forget the stances your party once took. The Internet
01/24/01: The new Executive Orders
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