Russell
President Bush is assembling
his “armies of compassion” under the banner of Charitable choice — a decisive
move to contract out federal social service functions such as counseling for
alcohol and drug substance abuse, shelter and food services for homeless
persons, assistance with employment and after school care to private religious
organizations – to name a few.
The Executive Orders issued
January 29 increase the role of faith-based and other community based
organizations by establishing a new bureaucracy headed by the White House Office
of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The Order mandates that Justice,
Education, Labor, HHS, and HUD create new Centers for Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives within 45 days. As stated, the new agency Centers will coordinate
efforts to “eliminate regulatory, contracting, and other programmatic obstacles
to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the
provision of social services.” Specifically, each Center is to conduct an audit
of barriers, incorporate faith-based and other community organizations “to the
greatest extent possible.” Bush designated $24 million dollars for the new
faith-based bureaucracy.
As others have noted, these
Orders dangerously reduce the separation between church and state. There are
other big problems with this push to religious organizational control of public
services.
To begin with historically,
the faithful have held curious and destructive attitudes about disablement. They
have viewed disability as the mark of the devil, caused by demons, as a bad omen
(best to avoid the disabled persons), or as the result of personal sin or a
flawed soul and all such religious inspired nonsense as this.
As a wheelchair user, I have
been accosted by complete strangers of religious persuasion on the street who
have made it their God-bound duty to impose their beliefs upon me by making sure
that I know about Jesus. More than one has wanted to “heal” me on the spot and
they have not hesitated to explain it all to me. To these religious people my
body symbolizes the imperfect vessel — one that needs spiritual cleansing in
order to be made “whole” by the grace of God. To them, I am a spiritual tragedy,
burdened by my "suffering" which could be erased if I just believed in Jesus
enough. To them it is lack of faith that has cause my disability, not the German
measles my mother had in her first trimester of pregnancy.
Bush has appointed these kind
of people to high positions in our government. Former Governor of Missouri John
Ashcroft, now the US Attorney General, for instance, has stated that
disabilities are the product of sin. According to the Bazelon Center for Mental
Health Law, Ashcroft reportedly prayed over a child who had developed a brain
injury in order to get rid of the sin he believed was the cause of the injury.
At a rally at the Missouri Capitol rotunda on Mental Health Day, Ashcroft, who
opposed increases to state mental health funding, preached from an open bible
and encouraged mental health consumers, their families and advocates to stop
relying on doctors and medications and to “go down to the altar and pray”
telling them that is how they would “be cured.”
To be fair, such behavior is
not limited to the Christian religion. One day as I was making my way down the
street, a man of middle eastern origin cast his gaze upon me and began clapping
his hands at spaced intervals, muttering words I could not understand. When I
got past him (I guess far enough), he stopped. He did not do this to any of the
non-wheelchair users he met on the street. The clapping was clearly directed at
my physical state and I am certain it was some religious based ritual to ward of
the demons of “sickness.”
In the year 2001 there is
still cause to ask will disabled persons seeking services from faith-based
organizations be taken to church, temples or mosques instead of being provided
with medical assistance? Will spiritually “inferior” disabled persons of all
sorts be pressured into joining a particular congregation and adopting that
faith when they approach one of these faith based groups for services? These are
attitudes that the Disability Rights Movement has worked hard to move the public
beyond. Rights, for instance, are based on entitlements and laws geared to
promote equality regardless of age, race, gender, sexual preference or
disability.
There are other problems with
this return to charity as salvation. Is the American memory span so short as to
forget the days before social safety net existed? Charity failed then to build
an egalitarian society and government entitlements were created to mitigate
against the harsh economic realities that persisted in capitalist societies with
charities in place. Moreover charities arbitrarily pick and choose who to serve.
No one is entitled to anything from a charity, rather one must be designated a
"deserving" case. Anyone can be denied access to services at any time for any
reason.
Perhaps the beauty of the
Bush plan to conservatives is this: if they can successfully promote the false
notion that private organizations and businesses can best deliver social
services, faith-based funding will undermine the Jeffersonian principle that
government has any obligation to “promote the general welfare.” Entitlement –
the right to government services – is likely the real target of the Faith-Based
Initiative.
If their past is any
indication, Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson (the new Secretary of Health and Human
Services), having close ties to ties to the conservative philanthropies that
sponsor most Republican ideologues, will play their roles to the hilt. Ashcroft,
for instance, set the back-to-charity direct funding ball rolling in the 1996
welfare reform act, which contained a section he drafted called "Charitable
Choice" that gave religious groups the right to present their religious beliefs
along with their services and discriminate in hiring. Thompson, as governor of
Wisconsin, tried to eliminate the disabled guarantee to Medicaid during the 1995
Congressional effort to block-grant Medicaid to the states. Calling the disabled
guarantee an “onerous mandate,” he led the Republican governors’ charge to end
this federal entitlement to health care.
The driving force behind
Charitable choice, however, is not limited to this president, one attorney
general or one HHS Secretary. Rather, the move to contracting-out of federal
functions to private religious organizations is the next logical extension of a
historical shift which began with the neo-conservative Reagan era attacks on the
redistributive system of government entitlement transfers in the 80s, picked up
in the 90’s Gingrich era as austerity cuts under the “Contract with America,”
and now posed as “compassionate conservatism” in an era of budget surplus.
In an era where both parties
have become worshipers of the market and are owned by investors and
corporations, the matter has become bipartisan. Neo-liberal and Third Way
politics both replace redistributive goals with a market approach catering to
business class needs and both adopt the supply-side theory that the economy is
burdened by overly-generous welfare provisions which give too much security to
workers. Remember Former Democratic Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado said on
McNeil Lehrer some years back "the New Deal is unsustainable…Social Security is
obsolete … Medicare is unsustainable." President Clinton explained his pro
business agenda clearly when he said "the era of big government is over." His
motto became "more empowerment, less entitlement" and his slogan "from welfare
to work."
In the past eight years
Americans have gotten less. The politicos gave us welfare “reform” and deep cuts
to Medicare, Medicaid, food stamp programs, disabled childrens’ SSI, and
benefits for immigrants. When Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and
Work Opportunity Act in 1996 throwing millions of mothers onto the low end job
market with no guarantee of a job or a living wage, he eliminated Title IV of
the Social Security Act and ended the sixty year federal protection for the poor
guaranteed by FDR. During those years of budget negotiations Clinton/Gore
allowed the GOP to siphon $50 billion from food stamps, remove the cost of
living adjustments for food stamps and take another $20 billion from aid to
legal immigrants. Their administration did nothing to undo Reagan’s slashes to
SSI, rather his 1997 budget sought to save $596 billion by tightening SSI
eligibility rules. Over 250,000 disabled children were severed from SSI and
Medicaid, often the only available form of health care.
Joseph Lieberman is 100%
behind Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. Al Gore supported Charitable choice during
his presidential campaign. The bipartisan emphasis on Charitable choice
conveniently ignores the consequences of neo-liberal economic and social
policies put in place over the past thirty years and escalated over the past
decade. According to Independent Sector, congregations *have* seen an increased
demand in recent years. As a result of more people needing assistance, 41% of
congregations have opened a new program, 40% worked additional hours, and 39%
added capacity to their existing programs. If they could not serve the increased
need, 64% of congregations referred people to other organizations. 10% of
congregations put people on waiting lists while 19% of congregations turned
people away.
32.3 million people are
living below the official poverty line. 20 to 30 million Americans suffer from
hunger. Hunger has increased by 50% in this nation of a plenty since 1985 and
over 40% of those being served in soup kitchens are working poor — those who
work but do not earn enough to pay for food. These working poor – about 9.5
million people – work but remain in poverty. 10.3% of these persons worked full
time in 1997 during the economic “boom” but were not able to rise above the
poverty line. What is rarely noted is that the percentage of working poor has
grown over the past two decades: 7.7% of workers working full time lived in
poverty in 1978; and by 1997 the figure had climbed to 9.3%. According to U.S.
Census Bureau’s findings (1995), about 49 million people, one in five, lived in
a household whose members had difficulty satisfying basic needs. These
households didn’t make mortgage or rent payments, failed to pay utility bills
and/or had service shut off, didn’t get enough to eat, needed to see a doctor or
dentist but didn’t or otherwise could not meet essential expenses. An estimated
7 million Americans are homeless.
It is no surprise that the
Bush administration continues to obscure the structural causes of inequality by
proposing that faith-based organizations fill the inflation of need which the
decision-making class has caused with its neo-liberal social and economic
policies. Both political parties have long taken discussion of the underlying
flawed economic system off the table. Poverty persists. There is an ongoing lack
of entitlement to the necessities like universal health care (43 million without
healthcare now?) and no right to living wage employment that would enable a
quality life. There is no guarantee of an income in the place of employment that
would make one free from grave need. There has never been a substantial social
safety net in the US. Now charitable choice portends to be one more way to undo
the dirty entitlements that the big business contributors to the Bush and Gore
campaigns despise so much. A plenty needs to be done to change that —
assembling an "army for economic rights" to counter the "armies of compassion"
might be a start.
Marta Russell can be
reached at [email protected] http://disweb.org/