Sarah Posner, author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, writes a regular column for The American Prospect called The Fundamentalist. The column is well worth a weekly read because few do a better job than Posner of keeping a close eye on the shenanigans of the radical religious right.
In her latest article, Posner points to a list of suggestions from Barry Lynn, president of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, for actions President-elect Barack Obama can quickly take to reverse the Bush administration’s faith-based policies, which coddled the extremist religious right and implemented their every whim into policy and law.
Lynn’s suggestions are:
- Repeal six Bush executive orders relating to his Faith-Based Initiative and replace them with one or more executive orders that prohibit discriminatory hiring by faith-based grantees, prohibit proselytizing by any tax-funded programs, and distribute taxpayer dollars through separate tax-exempt organizations, not churches themselves.
- Issue a clear and unequivocal directive from the Department of Defense prohibiting evangelism and other religious discrimination in the military.
- Open up new stem-cell lines for federal research funding.
- End funding for abstinence-only education and replace it with comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education.
Barry Lynn is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and his diligent efforts to shore up the wall between church and state in America continue to give the extremist right a bad case of the heebie jeebies. His writings and additional information about Americans United for the Separation of Church and State can be found at the group’s website.
Both Sarah Posner’s columns and Barry Lynn’s efforts can be followed by subscribing to RSS feeds at the links above.
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