|
|||||||||||||||||
RELATED LINKSInternal LinksOther internal:
External LinksCursor.orgMediaTransparency.org sponsor More stories by Bill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs' Media Transparency writersAndrew J. Weaver FundometerEvaluate any page on the World Wide Web against our databases of people, recipients, and funders of the conservative movement. |
ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz Faith-based drug warsBush recruits religious youth groups as ground troops for the 'drug wars'What does advocating "religious hiring rights," a $4 billion workplace retraining bill, and the war on drugs have in common? The short answer: Bring on the faith-based organizations! Although 30 months have passed since President Bush announced the centerpiece of his domestic agenda - his faith-based initiative - and no significant broader efforts to fund his initiative has emerged from Congress, the administration continues to move ahead on a number of fronts. Bush's latest faith-based proposal involves enlisting religious youth groups in the war on drugs. According to the Washington Times, the administration recently printed 75,000 copies of a guidebook to the drug wars called "Pathways to Prevention: Guiding Youth to Wise Decisions." The 100-page pamphlet "seeks to teach youth leaders how to handle questions and concerns about substance abuse." In addition to the publication, there's a new website (TheAntiDrug.com/Faith) and an e-mail newsletter. The new anti-drug project is built around three premises which are spelled out in a fact sheet titled "Marijuana and Kids: Faith": 1) "Religion plays a major role in the lives of American teens;" 2) "Religion and religiosity repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult marijuana and substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can lead to marijuana and substance use;" and 3) "Youth turn to faith communities [but] most faith institutions [with] youth ministries [do not] incorporate significant teen substance abuse prevention activities." Krissy Oechslin, assistant director of communications at the Washington, DC-based Marijuana Policy Project, the nation's largest marijuana policy reform organization, is concerned about the faith-based effort. "We do not oppose efforts to teach kids the truth about drugs. But the one thing that will likely be conspicuously missing from this faith-based initiative is any discussion about the effects of our drug laws," Oechslin told me in a telephone interview. "You can talk all you want about prevention and reducing demand but the fact of the matter is, nearly 750,000 people were arrested for marijuana violations in 2001; nearly 90 percent of those were for simple possession," Oechslin pointed out. "Despite the fact they are in a religious setting, they will likely avoid significant ethical questions raised by the drug wars, such as whether kids should be put into prison for using marijuana. If you talked with John Walters about this he would probably say that these kinds of questions are irrelevant to the conversation." Moving forward on faithBush's faith-based anti-drug effort is the latest in a series of moves advancing his faith-based initiative. In late-June, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Organizations spelled out its position on a concept called "religious hiring rights." In a position paper titled "Protecting the Civil Rights and Religious Liberty of Faith-Based Organizations: Why Religious Hiring Rights Must Be Preserved," the administration argued religious organizations that receive government grants should be allowed to hire anyone they darn well please. At least two pieces of legislation with "religious hiring rights" provisions are currently under consideration by Congress: "The School Readiness Act of 2003," H.R. 2210, allows religious organizations receiving government funds to provide Head Start services to discriminate in their hiring practices; and the $4 billion Workforce Reinvestment and Adult Education Act - passed by the full House on a party-line 220-204 vote - also included a similar faith-based exemption. 'Faith. The Anti-Drug'At a press conference surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic community leaders, John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said: "Faith plays an important role when it comes to teen marijuana prevention. We are urging youth ministers, volunteers and faith leaders to integrate drug prevention messages and activities into their sermons and youth programming and are providing them with key tools and resources to make a difference. "As long as [America's youth] have, in their minds, the expectation that drug abuse comes as a rite of passage, we will continue to lose too many of our young people." (Isn't it amazing how many press conferences Bush Administration officials have held surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic religious leaders?) "The reality is a lot of people don't know how to talk about these issues," said Jim Towey, the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "According to data from Monitoring the Future, 90 percent of teens in the U.S. are affiliated with a religious denomination and 43 percent of eighth graders attend religious services weekly. Churches, temples and mosques are well positioned to cultivate anti-drug values and teach effective coping tools to deal with negative peer pressure," said Towey. The new campaign's slogan - "Faith. The Anti-Drug" - appears to indicate that Walters, appointed drug czar by Bush in May 2001, is turning down the volume from an earlier anti-marijuana ad campaign focused on teens. That high-powered effort was aimed at linking teenagers using marijuana to the funding of terrorist organizations and support for terrorism. Walters, characterized as a "drug 'hawk'" well known for his moral condemnation of drug use and his criticism of Clinton's drug war techniques," by Salon's Janelle Brown, pointed out that "we need to be candid" about the situation confronting America's youth. Being candid, however, has not been one of the drug czar's strong suits. If Walters were candid he would talk about the billions of dollars wasted on the war on drugs; he would talk about the succession of cynical anti-drug advertising campaigns run by high-powered and well-connected ad agencies whose only success has been in lining its own pockets with tax-payer funds; and he would talk about the hundreds of thousands of people languishing in prisons because of marijuana-related convictions. In May, 2002, the Village Voice's Cynthia Cotts reported that a Wall Street Journal article citing the results of a Walters-authorized survey - conducted by the private research firm Westat and the University of Pennsylvania - "shows the government's anti-drug ads have completely failed to slow down teen drug use. Over the past five years," Cotts writes, "the feds spent $929 million to spread the message, and what did they get? A quarter of high school seniors still use illegal drugs, and after seeing the ads, some 13-year-old girls started smoking pot." If the new emphasis on faith-based interventions sounds like the repackaging of an old idea, well, that's because it very well might be. Last year, when the president announced his National Drug Control Strategy, FY-2003, "compassionate coercion" was the term coined and touted as a key element for success. Under the heading "Healing America's Drug Users" a White House fact sheet said: "Getting people into treatment - including programs that call upon the power of faith - will require us to create a new climate of "compassionate coercion," which begins with family, friends, employers, and the community. Compassionate coercion also uses the criminal justice system to get people into treatment." Bush's advocacy of "religious hiring rights" and the administration's grafting of faith-based organizations onto the drug wars cuts to the heart of church/state separation, says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. According to Lynn, this new anti-drug effort is another administration attempt to blur those lines. In a Press Release issued by Americans United Lynn said, "The Bush administration seems to think there's a 'faith-based' solution to every social and medical problem in America. The project announced today is one very small part of a larger crusade that raises troubling constitutional concerns." "The White House is ignoring vital constitutional safeguards," continued Lynn. "The Constitution calls for a separation between religion and government, not a merger." Lynn pointed out that Walters recently appeared at a Riverside, Calif. "Teen Challenge" facility whose treatment program "relies on conversion to fundamentalist Christianity as its form of treatment." Only evangelical Christians are hired to carry out its work. In testimony before Congress in 2001, a Teen Challenge official noted that some Jews who participate in the program convert to Christianity, becoming what he called "completed Jews." Many Jewish leaders found the term offensive, the AU Press Release pointed out. This far, says Jeremy Leaming, Communications Associate at Americans United, government funds have not been awarded to Teen Challenge or any other religious organizations for John Walter's new anti-drug initiative. "But," he added, "we are watching the situation closely." "Bush's whole drug policy is in reality one gigantic faith-based initiative," Bruce Mirken, the Marijuana Policy Project's director of communications said in a recent e-mail. "It's sure not based on science or data, particularly in regard to marijuana. The government's own figures show that marijuana use by kids under 21 has gone up over 2000 percent since marijuana was banned, and a National Research Council study commissioned by the Drug Czar's office reported in 2001 that the evidence shows little or no relationship between the severity of criminal sanctions and rates or frequency of drug use. "If the government announced a program to reduce unemployment, and unemployment subsequently rose 2000 percent, that policy would be toast faster than you can say 'Bill Bennett loves to gamble,'" Mirken pointed out. "But the administration believes, with deep religious conviction that drugs are bad and must be banned. It's truly a faith based drug policy, and it ruins lives every day." sign in, or register to email stories or comment on them.
|
MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs'Right Wing foundation-funded anti-environmental think tank grabbing a wider audience for 'free market environmentalism' On the 15th anniversary of Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's book "Free Market Environmentalism" -- the seminal book on the subject -- Anderson, the Executive Director of the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC - formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center) spoke in late-January at an event sponsored by Squaw Valley Institute at the Resort at Squaw Creek in California. While it may have been just another opportunity to speak on "free market environmentalism" and not the kickoff of a "victory tour," nevertheless it comes at a time when PERC's ideas are taking root.
Bill Berkowitz Neil Bush of Saudi ArabiaDuring recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy' In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights." In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as "a kind of tribal democracy."
Bill Berkowitz Newt Gingrich's back door to the White HouseAmerican Enterprise Institute "Scholar" and former House Speaker blames media for poll showing 64 percent of the American people wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances Whatever it is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come to represent in American politics, the guy is nothing less than fascinating. One day he's espousing populist rhetoric about the need to cut the costs of college tuition and the next day he's talking World War III. One day he's claiming that the "war on terror" may force the abridgement of fundamental first amendment rights and the next he's advancing a twenty-first century version of his Contract with America. At the same time he's publicly proclaiming how "stupid" it is that the race for the presidency has already started you know that he's trying to figure out how to out finesse Rudy, McCain and Romney for the nomination. And last week, when Fox News' Chris Wallace cited a poll showing that 64 percent of the public would never vote for him, he was quick to blame those results on how unfairly he was treated by the mainstream media back in the day.
Bill Berkowitz American Enterprise Institute takes lead in agitating against IranDespite wrongheaded predictions about the war on Iraq, neocons are on the frontlines advocating military conflict with Iran After doing such a bang up job with their advice and predictions about the outcome of the war on Iraq, would it surprise you to learn that America's neoconservatives are still in business? While at this time we are not yet seeing the same intense neocon invasion of our living rooms -- via cable television's news networks -- that we saw during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless, a host of policy analysts at conservative think tanks -- most notably the American Enterprise Institute -- are being heeded on Iran by those who count - folks inside the Bush Administration.
Bill Berkowitz After six years, opposition gaining on George W. Bush's Faith Based InitiativeUnmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Bill Berkowitz Frank Luntz calls Republican leadership in Washington 'One giant whining windbag'On the outs with the GOP, legendary degrader of discourse is moving to California He doesn't make great art; nothing he does elevates the human spirit; he doesn't illuminate, he bamboozles. He has become expert in subterfuge, hidden meanings, word play and manipulation. Frank Luntz has been so good at what he does that those paying close attention gave it its own name: "Luntzspeak."
Bill Berkowitz Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouseFueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bill Berkowitz Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action jihadFounder and Chair of the American Civil Rights Institute scouting five to nine states for new anti-affirmative action initiatives Fresh from his most recent victory -- in Michigan this past November -- Ward Connerly, the Black California-based maven of anti-affirmative action initiatives, appears to be preparing to take his jihad on the road. According to a mid-December report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Connerly said that he was "exploring moves into nine other states."
Bill Berkowitz Tom Tancredo's missionThe Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.
Bill Berkowitz Institute on Religion and Democracy slams 'Leftist' National Council of ChurchesNew report from conservative foundation-funded IRD charges the NCC with being a political surrogate for MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and other liberal organizations If you prefer your religious battles sprinkled with demagoguery, sanctimoniousness, and simplistic attacks, the Institute on Religion and Democracy's (IRD) latest broadside against the National Council of Churches (NCC) certainly fits the bill.
|
|||||||||||||||
Faithbased Watch
Printer friendly
