Barack Obama Has Consistently Defended Religious Freedom - Mother Jones

[cbayer]

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/barack-obamas-has-consistently-defended-religious-freedom


Is President Obama waging a war on religion? Just typing the words is enough to make slitting my wrists seem like a fairly reasonable life choice. But Steve Chapman, obviously a stouter man than me, takes the time to dissect just how dumb this argument is:

Amid all the uproar, it's easy to overlook something equally important: the administration's many battles for religious liberty.

....The most conspicuous surprise involves government rules for faith-based organizations that get federal funding for social services. President George W. Bush issued an executive order allowing such groups to hire only people who share their faith—exempting them from the usual ban on religious discrimination....In his presidential campaign, [Obama] said his view was simple: "If you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them—or against the people you hire—on the basis of their religion." But it hasn't worked out that way. Obama has left Bush's rule in place, infuriating many groups that expected a reversal.

....His commitment is also on display in defending churches against municipal governments that would prefer to do without them....It filed a brief in support of a Hasidic Jewish congregation's lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, which had forbidden it to hold services in a private home. A federal court ordered the city to back off.

more at link

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

1. Bookmarked!!! K&R!!!

[Humanist_Activist]

2. Why is this posted again? And why is Obama being lauded for a horrible policy that started under...

Bush?

[cbayer]

3. Again? It was just published this morning.

[Humanist_Activist]

4. Ahh, this looks like a rewrite of a Chicago Tribune article...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/121810866

That rug posted yesterday.

ON EDIT: Actually on further examination, it looks like rather blatant plagiarizing, they even talk about the same examples, that's far beyond coincidence. Unless this one was published with the Tribune's permission.

EDIT 2: On even further examination, this article refers back to the other at its original source, Libertarian nutjobs at reason.com.

[cbayer]

5. I see what you are saying. The part lifted from the Tribune article is more obvious in the

original Mother Jones article and is attributed, and I did not recognize it as having already been posted yesterday.

Sorry about that.

[Humanist_Activist]

7. No one's perfect, the only reason why I caught it was because I read the article from yesterday...

and I forgot the precise source for it till I looked it up again. Memory is a funny thing, remembered the content, but not the authorship or publisher.

[Jim__]

6. Great information CB! Thanks for posting. - n/t