The Nation - Follow the Money

[realFedUp]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=kaplan

Follow the Money

by ESTHER KAPLAN



snip

Now, five years later, thanks to George W. Bush, the Christian right is on top of the world. Bush has not only bucked up the movement by ceding huge swaths of his domestic and international policy to this lobby, from his efforts to block abortions and gay marriage to his expenditure of significant political capital to support abstinence education, church-based social services and socially conservative judges. He has also revived the movement by injecting tens of millions of federal dollars directly into the coffers of the Christian right's grassroots organizations, while at the same time starving their most vigorous political opponents of funds--singling out family planning and AIDS organizations for special punishment. While these groups receive a steady diet of financial audits, investigations and outright defunding, the President has turned his faith-based initiative into what the Rev. Eugene Rivers of Boston calls "a financial watering hole for the right-wing evangelicals."As Weyrich told the conservative Christian magazine World shortly after Bush took office, "The Bush administration came along just in time to save many of these pro-family organizations. Four more years of a Gore administration--of being on the outside--and I think a lot of
them wouldn't have made it."

continued

[Miss Authoritiva]

1. I'm willing to agree to a trade-off:

Churches lose their tax-exempt status and interested/committed individuals can fund groups like Planned Parenthood on their own.

Federal money (and tax-exempt status is federal money) always comes with strings attached. Sometimes the only way to get rid of the strings is to get ride of the federal money.