My Date with the President

Would you believe it?!? I got to see Bush give a speech last Thursday. Wasn't that my lucky day ;) Joan (the social worker from BCares) and I got to go to a conference put on by the White House for Faith-Based Community Initiatives. This faith-based thing is pretty big here and I'm not quite sure what I think about it. I've been observing this weird reverse separation of church and state phenomenon. The Bush administration is handing off what I would think to be one of their duties as government, the delivery of social services, to the churches. Meanwhile, they are incorporating all this religious language into their speeches and such. I went to a similar conference put on by the State of Maryland at the end of February where the incorporation of religion (specifically Christianity) into politics was especially blatant. I think it's kind of scary. Please let me know if anything like this starts going down in Canada! It bothers me that churches are being burdened with providing social services. I realise that the church has a long history of doing this but to make it a duty of the churches and then to have them compete for grant money so that they can continue to get "great results" just seems wrong. Anyways, the speech was pretty awful. Bush quoted some statistics about how teen pregnancy is declining, abortions are declining (could that be because they are being outlawed?!?), etc. But he made no mention of homeless, poverty or dropout rates which are all abysmal and are probably the three biggest social problems currently. He also made some really bad joke about how he knows what it's like to live in temporary housing. But he did have some good news. His government is working on some initiatives. For example, they are want to give tax breaks to those individuals and corporations who donate food to the hungry. Can you just hear the applause? We did meet some cool people though. Like Ahmed who works for the Muslim Political Affairs Council on Capitol Hill. He was pretty worked up about the lack of diversity among those attending. He wanted to know if we could spot any other Muslims. How do we know what Muslims look like? Even he didn't look particularly "Muslim." But I really appreciated having him at our table. I don't think I would have been so aware of the very strong Christian focus of this faith-based conference. You could pick out the odd Jew but otherwise it was white Christian. I guess that reflects something...but I don't know if I want to explore that thought further.

Anyways, here's a link to a short article by the Associated Press about the conference.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031006D.shtml