Faith, Government, and Obama

Obama’s announcement that he will expand and improve upon Bush’s faith based intiative has many progressive liberals upset. I understand the importance of “seperation of church and state” but I believe some Dems might be over-reacting to this policy. Clinton-Gore actually first started giving federal funding to faith based social services and Bush just put his evangelical spin on it. Washington Post Op-Ed Columnist, Michael Gerson, has a good piece discussing Obama’s announcement: Paying Tribute to a Good Idea. Gerson writes:

In his speech, Obama — both presidential candidate and professor of constitutional law — affirmed the central intellectual commitment of faith-based welfare reform: that government can support the secular social work of sectarian groups within the bounds of the First Amendment. And this, he argued, is not merely appropriate but necessary, because some problems are “simply too big for government to solve alone.”