Centrist

Where to begin.

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – Taking a page from President Bush, Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday he wants to expand White House efforts to steer social service dollars to religious groups, risking protests in his own party with his latest aggressive reach for voters who usually vote Republican.

Obama contended he is merely stating long-held positions — surprising to some, he said, after a primary campaign in which he was “tagged as being on the left.”

He was tagged as being on the left because he’s a socialist, and ranked as the most liberal member of the Senate.

Obama’s high-profile embrace of a key theme of Bush’s time in office — the “faith-based initiative” — is just the latest example of him trying to show his centrist side.

Last week, he quoted Reagan, saying “we have to trust but verify” after Bush lifted trade sanctions against North Korea and moved to remove the country from the U.S. terrorism list.

Obama also supported new electronic surveillance rules for the government’s eavesdropping program, saying “an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue,” after opposing a similar bill last year. After the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s gun ban, he said he favors both an individual’s right to bear firearms as well as a government’s right to regulate them.

Expanding government-funded social programs is not “centrist,” it’s liberal.  Expanding the ability to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists is not “centrist,” it’s common sense.  Favoring individual gun rights is completely meaningless when he’d appoint the kinds of judges that would rule against it:

Obama has also praised current Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter. “I want people on the bench who have enough empathy, enough feeling, for what ordinary people are going through,” Obama said.

All three of those judges have voted to restrict gun rights, extend Constitutional rights to Guantanamo prisoners, and overturn state laws that would allow the death penalty for child rapists.  In other words, fuck the Constitution, fuck the law, fuck the will of the people, we need judges to feel their way through the issues we face.  I doubt we’d see any judges who feel for fetuses among Obama’s nominees.  But I digress.

And while Bush supports allowing all religious groups to make any employment decisions based on faith, Obama proposes allowing religious institutions to hire and fire based on religion only in the non-taxpayer-funded portions of their activities — consistent with current federal, state and local laws. “That makes perfect sense,” he said.

Where there are state or local laws prohibiting hiring choices based on sexual orientation in the federally funded portion of the programs, he said he would support those being applied.

So Obama’s federal money would come with strings attached.  If a church has a faith-based program for dealing with drug addiction, in order to get federal money to help with their program, they’d need to hire people whose behavior or lifestyle they’d be morally opposed to.  So let’s follow the money.  This means that when organizations refuse federal money based on principle, more government money will become available to flow into the racist, hateful, “black liberation” churches like the one that Obama attended for 20 years.  Yay.

And what about the left and their devotion to the separation of church and state?  They’ll give him a pass, because after all, Obama tries not to have his religious beliefs “dominate or determine his political views.”  He’s not one of those bible-thumpers or anything.