Friday, November 18, 2016

Let's see if the Left is truly concerned about separation of church and state

Bishops push back on Trump’s hardline illegal immigration stance

Catholic Charities USA, the largest charitable organization run by the church, receives about 65 percent of its annual budget from state and federal governments, making it an arm of the federal welfare state, said Brian Anderson, a researcher with the Manhattan Institute.

The federal government came to increasingly rely on the church to help it with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and the charities “imbued with their new faith in the government’s potential to solve social problems, eagerly accepted government money,” Mr. Anderson wrote in an essay for the Manhattan Institute.

Catholic Charities received nearly a quarter of its funding from government by the end of the 1960s, more than half by the late 1970s and more than 60 percent by the mid-1980s, the level where it has remained ever since, Mr. Anderson said.

Today, Catholic charity work is a large part of this nation’s social safety net, according to Mr. Lenkowsky, now a professor of practice in public affairs and philanthropy at Indiana University.

“A lot of the charity is distributing food, running homeless shelters, most things considered charitable,” said Mr. Lenkowsky. “So what we’re not talking about is federal money being paid for priests and religious activities.”

Fifty-seven government agencies are now contracting with the Catholic Church. If the church were a state, its $1.6 billion in funding would rank it about 43rd out of the 50 states in total federal funding, according to analysis by Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com. The majority of those funds are dedicated to refugee services and rehabilitation.

“Churches have generally looked to find common cause with secular goals, adapting their activities to the secular philanthropic model, if only to benefit from grants from the U.S. government,” Olivier Zunz, a social historian, wrote in his book “Philanthropy in America.” “Catholic Relief Services and federated Protestant charities have acted not as missions but as humanitarian institutions combining taxpayer money with their own for carrying out modernizing projects in many theaters around the world.”

However, Mr. Anderson argues, because the Catholic Church and its charities are so ingrained in the U.S. government’s welfare system, it’s hard to reform and better it. For example, in 1996 Catholic Charities lobbied heavily against welfare-reform law and met with then-President Clinton to help derail it. At the time, a Jesuit priest, the Rev. Fred Kammer, who is now the director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University, said the welfare-reform law would be “a national social catastrophe. No one will be spared the consequences.”

There’s also friction between state and church, with Catholic charities taking on such a prominent role in the government’s welfare system.

Conservative Christians, unlike Catholics and some other religious charities such as those run by Lutherans, have resisted taking federal money to do charitable work, insisting proselytism and good works go hand in hand and can’t be separated from one another — which most federal and state grants require.

“If a religious institution is required to do something that is in conflict of its religious views, it may opt out from receiving federal funding or make the pragmatic decision to stay in to get the funding,” said Mr. Lenkowsky.

For example, most of the Catholic charities in Illinois have decided to close down their adoption programs rather than comply with a state requirement that says they can no longer receive state funding if they turn away same-sex couples for adoptive services or foster care.

“On one hand the government can’t make any laws infringing on someone’s civil liberties, but it also has to protect free expression of religion, and those are in tension in the age of the welfare state, where you are contracting with a religious organization to deliver secular social services,” Mr. Lenkowsky said. In many of these cases, it will be up to the courts to decide, he added.

Georgetown University, the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit University, broke with church doctrine in order to accommodate for civil rights.

When faced with the decision to officially recognize a student homosexual group on its campus, it decided to formally recognize it for fear it would be in violation of Washington, D.C.’s civil rights law and anti-discrimination protections. The school wanted to build a new dormitory at the time and needed municipal bonds to secure it.

For Catholic Charities USA, the priority of helping those in need trumps all, and they can’t fulfill that mission without financial assistance from the government.

“While Catholic Charities agencies, and many other faith-based non-profits, will continue to work with families and individuals on the brink, we know that in order for our nation to truly make a significant change in the numbers of those in poverty, we need support and commitment from the for-profit sector and from government. We cannot do this alone,” the group said in a statement to The Times.

The nation is better off having Catholic charities participate in the federal welfare system than the alternative of having only secular organization and the government do it, Mr. Lenkowsky said.

“Not only would Catholic charities be hurt, but our society would be much worse off because these services would be provided by government employees and secular service agencies run by social workers,” Mr. Lenkowsky said. “There’s certain things Catholic charities can do that social workers can’t do, like pastoral counseling — a minister trained to give counseling to people facing critical issues like substance abuse.”

If Catholic charities were cut out of the federal system, secular social workers may determine that pastors may not be qualified to give counseling, eliminating a helpful avenue for some in need, he said.

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Saul Alinsky's
Rules for Radicals

(or understanding current Democratic tactics)

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Rule 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag.

Rule 8: Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period.

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

Rule 10: Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

Rule 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

Communist Manifesto 10 Planks

10 Conditions For Transition To Communism

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.

The Goals of Communism

(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.