In today’s New York Times Joseph Loconte argues in favor of Bush’s plan to allow federally-funded charities to hire people based on their religious beliefs. His argument is that outlawing such hiring practices is a threat to people who rely on the charities:
One Pentecostal minister in Boston, Eugene Rivers III, a Democratic supporter of the initiative, says the effort to criminalize the hiring policies of church-based programs would “prevent the delivery of services to this country’s black and brown urban poor.”
It’s not hard to see why. Many of those helped by these groups, after all, need the influence of religious values in their lives. If an organization’s workers don’t embody these ideals, its ability to care for people effectively will be compromised. So argues Ruben Austria of the Urban Youth Alliance, a Christian agency that pairs church mentors with troubled juveniles in the Bronx. “When you’re dealing with kids who are really broken, they need something powerful to change their lives,” he told me. “We require that staff be people of faith, who can convince these kids they care about them more than anyone else in the world.”
So, basically, only religious people and religious values can help the urban poor, so criminalizing discriminatory hiring practices screws the poor. Since we don’t want to screw the poor, we should allow charities that receive government money to hire based on religious affiliation. Another bullshit argument against a type of church-state separation based on the assumption that religion is the only possible source of values. In this case, the argument is actually that only believers can care about other people. Wow.
(The Importance of Believing in Charity)