Lately it is looking more and more like the latter; especially when you have a potential Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair sending out racist parodies of the president elect as Christmas gifts. Chip Saltsman, distributed a CD containing “Barack the Magic Negro” as part of his campaign to be elected chairman of the Republican National Committee.

There were the usual repudiations from the usual suspects. RNC chair Mike Duncan issued a statement Saturday distancing the party’s leadership from Saltsman and Newt Gingrich wrote an article in the Washington Times. The larger question is how long is this sort of self inflicted damage going to continue? I don’t know, but one thing I do know it will many wilderness years until the Republican Party recovers!

According to E.J. Dionne, “One sign of Obama’s intention to put actions behind his words was his endorsement of government partnerships with faith-based and community institutions that do the work of charity and justice, combined with a call to reform President Bush’s approach to these issues.”

The paper (see executive summary and recommendations) purports to be a discussion that intends to open the discussion concerning the issues of faith-based organizations and government working together to help offer charity, justice, and reform.

“The next president’s answers to these questions should be rooted in sound public policy and in respect for the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom. This paper presents some options for the next president to consider.”

On December 5, co-authors E.J. Dionne Jr., Brookings senior fellow, and Melissa Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University Divinity School, presented their findings at a Brookings event. A discussion with Stanley Carlson-Thies of the Center for Public Justice and The Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance and David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism followed.

The elevation of Barak Obama to the highest political office in the land is a welcome sign that America’s shameful history of racism and slavery is decisively being put behind us. Less clear is what an Obama administration will do to carry out the promise of a rejuvenated and expanded faith-based initiative.

The faith-based initiative began during the Clinton administration with the adoption of Charitable Choice in 1996 as part of federal welfare reform. The core of the initiative from the very beginning has been safeguarding the faith identity and practices of faith-based organizations that agree to partner with government programs to serve the needy. It is in better protecting the faith of faith-based organizations that a level playing field is created. It is when their religious freedom is better protected that more faith-based organizations are ready to respond to the government’s “welcome” sign.

Will the Obama administration continue this vital trend–not only announcing a warmer welcome for faith-based groups but making sure that governmental rules and practices in fact are more hospitable to faith-based organizations? Many faith-based organizations are waiting to see what will happen. Call it hopeful wariness, or watchful hopefulness. They know the new administration will face many pressures from its supporters and allies to downplay religious freedom.

Despite the inevitable controversies, a successful faith-based initiative will protect, not threaten, the faith of faith-based organizations.

Stanley Carlson-Thies, is director of the Coalition to Preserve Religious Freedom, based in Washington, D.C.

“We should not sit back for even a split second and wonder how it will work out. We should not try to organize a plan on the spur of the moment to travel to key battleground states. We should be prepared already to immediately travel to Washington, D.C., head straight for the White House, occupy Lafayette Square Park, the Ellipse, and surrounding streets, block entrances, and shut the place down until Obama is recognized as the president elect or we are guaranteed a credible election with universal registration and hand-counted paper ballots.”

Goldsmith predicted that a McCain administration would focus on additional social needs in expanding the federal partnership with secular and religious grassroots groups. He said McCain would stress choice in government-funded services, expanding a principle at the center of the Bush administration’s Access to Recovery drug treatment program, which uses vouchers so that addicts have the opportunity to choose a faith-based treatment program. McCain would take a bottom-up approach, encouraging continued state and local involvement and greater private philanthropy. And, Goldsmith said, McCain would make religious freedom a central value, “protect[ing] the right of faith-based organizations to participate fully in public programs without renouncing their beliefs, removing religious objects or symbols, or becoming subject to government-imposed hiring practices.” Goldsmith said that a President McCain would seek to remove the restrictions on religious hiring that exist in some federal programs, such as Head Start. Such restrictions, Goldsmith says, only reduces “the number of effective partners at the local level” and undermines the government’s supposed interest in partnering with faith-based organizations.

DiIulio emphasized Sen. Obama’s deep commitment not only to an expanded federal faith-based initiative but also to bringing religious perspectives into the heart of his administration. Additional programs that tap the particular strengths of community groups will be developed, and, DiIulio said, an Obama administration will not simultaneously invite greater faith-based involvement in some program and cut back federal spending for the same program, a complaint many have had of the Bush administration. Larger secular and religious community-based organizations will be tapped to become trainers of grassroots organizations. The Obama administration will welcome the participation of all groups desiring to provide government-funded services without “proselytizing” and without mixing religion in with the services. DiIulio predicted that a Democratic Congress would support an expanded Obama faith-based initiative.

Concerning the statements that Senator Obama has made about religious staffing when a faith-based organization receives government funds, DiIulio said he would welcome “a more forthright, no qualifiers statement” from the Senator. And he held out the hope that an Obama administration might adopt a status quo position on this issue rather than seeking to restrict religious staffing in the many programs where it is now permitted.

In response to a question, Sen. Obama pointed out that the First Amendment religion clauses are two-fold: keeping America from becoming a theocracy but also ensuring that faith-based organizations need not “modify their views in order to get government funding.” Nathan Diament, Director of Public Policy at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, noted, “Senator Obama’s defense of religious organizations to maintain their principled beliefs–even if those beliefs differ from the public opinon–and not forfeit either their right to be heard in the public debates of our time or surrender those beliefs in order to qualify for government funding is important and noteworthy.”

Before the Berlin Wall fell, a popular grafitti spray painted on walls everywhere around Moscow and East Germany was “Kill a Kommie for Mommie.” That’s how sick people were of the Stalinist welfare state that Obama and his corporate and welfare cronies would create as the great anachronism of 1930’s style taxation, increased welfare spending, mindless protectionism, the utter ruination of Social Security and the healthcare system, not to mention banana boat diplomacy. Line up the lawyers now and let’s get the impeachment papers ready to roll as the first order of business for the 111th Congress.