Condi's Mandate For African-American Churches and Africa
- Thread starter Mello Mello
- Start date
i gave answers that you responded to over and over and over with the same shit.
now some people like being a repetitious attention whore(no names because i dont want dolemite bitching and moaning and crying again to have me banned), but i'm not like that.
say something new and maybe i'll think about wasting time on this. again.
now some people like being a repetitious attention whore(no names because i dont want dolemite bitching and moaning and crying again to have me banned), but i'm not like that.
say something new and maybe i'll think about wasting time on this. again.
T
tehuti
Guest
Ex-Aide Questions Bush Vow to Back Faith-Based Efforts
By Alan Cooperman and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 15, 2005; Page A01
A former White House official said yesterday that President Bush has failed to deliver on his promise to help religious groups serve the poor, the homeless and drug addicts because the administration lacks a genuine commitment to its "compassionate conservative" agenda.
David Kuo, who was deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for much of Bush's first term, said in published remarks that the White House reaped political benefits from the president's promise to help religious organizations win taxpayer funding to care for "the least, the last and the lost" in the United States. But he wrote: "There was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda."
Analyzing Bush's failure to secure $8 billion in promised funding for the faith-based initiative during his first term, Kuo said there was "snoring indifference" among Republicans and "knee-jerk opposition" among Democrats in Congress.
"Capitol Hill gridlock could have been smashed by minimal West Wing effort," Kuo wrote on Beliefnet.com, a Web site on religion. "No administration since [Lyndon B. Johnson's] has had a more successful legislative record than this one. From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the 'poor people stuff.' "
Kuo's remarks were a rare breach of discipline for an administration that places a high premium on unity among current and former officials, and they mark the second time a former high-ranking official has criticized Bush's approach to the faith-based issue.
In August 2001, John J. DiIulio Jr., then-director of the faith-based office, became the first top Bush adviser to quit, after seven months on the job. In an interview with Esquire magazine a year later, DiIulio said the Bush White House was obsessed with the politics of the faith-based initiative but dismissive of the policy itself, and he slammed White House advisers as "Mayberry Machiavellis."
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said yesterday that Kuo is wrong about the president's commitment.
"The faith-based and community initiative has been a top priority for President Bush since the beginning of his first term and continues to be a top priority," Duffy said. "The president has mentioned the initiative in every State of the Union and fought for full funding."
In his first major policy speech as a presidential candidate in 2000, Bush proposed an $8 billion program to promote religious charities and other community groups. The idea quickly became the centerpiece of his call for compassionate conservatism. But it met stiff resistance in Congress, where Democrats said it threatened the separation of church and state, while Republicans showed little enthusiasm for new welfare-related spending.
After Congress balked at allowing religious groups to receive government funding and still hire, fire and promote employees on the basis of their faith, Bush issued executive orders to make it easier for religious groups to compete for government grants to run homeless shelters, counseling centers for teenagers and a wide range of other social programs.
"I think some good progress has been made, especially administratively," said John Bridgeland, White House director of domestic policy during Bush's first term. He added that Bush's decision to give chief speechwriter Michael J. Gerson responsibility for expanding the initiative should give the effort a lift in the second term.
In his Beliefnet column, Kuo said it was "a dream come true for me" when Bush promised in 2000 that in his first year in office he would provide $6 billion in tax incentives for private charitable giving, $1.7 billion for groups that care for the poor and $200 million for a Compassion Capital Fund to assist local faith-based organizations.
"Sadly, four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact," he wrote.
In June 2001, the promised tax incentives were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation "to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy," Kuo said. The Compassion Capital Fund has received a cumulative total of $100 million in the past four years, and new programs for children of prisoners, at-risk youth and prisoners reentering society have received a little more than $500 million over four years, he said.
"Unfortunately, sometimes even the grandly-announced 'new' programs aren't what they appear," Kuo wrote, citing as an example the three-year $150 million "gang prevention" effort Bush announced in this year's State of the Union address. In reality, Kuo said, that money is being taken out of the "already meager" $100 million request for the Compassion Capital Fund.
Kuo, 36, served as a special assistant to the president for 2 1/2 years and was deputy head of the faith-based office from February 2002 to December 2003. Before joining the White House, he worked for several prominent conservatives, including John D. Ashcroft and William J. Bennett. But before that, he had been a campaign volunteer for former representative Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.) and an intern for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
"I have always sought to try and figure out what's the best way for government to care for the poor. I went to the left and to the right, and I've ended up pretty much in the center," he said in a telephone interview yesterday.
In the Beliefnet column, Kuo said that he continues to have "deep respect, appreciation and affection for the president." Kuo added: "No one who knows him even a tiny bit doubts the sincerity and compassion of his heart."
Asked whether that meant he believes that Bush was sincere about the faith-based initiative but other White House officials were not, Kuo said he would "let the column speak for itself."
"The point of the column is that the poor need to be dealt with by everybody. There was phenomenal promise in the original vision for compassionate conservatism . . . and to try to pin blame on any one institution, one person, one body, one policy, is wrong," he said. "It's not about the White House, it's not about the Congress, it's not about interest groups. It's about everybody."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24561-2005Feb14.html
This is just typical Repugnant bushshit. Trying to draw AA into that repugnant party by using the plight and suffering of Africans with AIDS. Condi sold her soul a long time ago and now she is trying to recruit for the devil by using AA churches. The black churches have had the second worst negative impact on the black community only surpassed by drug dealers, whom we all know were part of an administration's idea also. Why not fix this country first, then go abroad and stop all of this pretentious christian behaviour. I guess you can't expect anything ligitimate from a bunch of fake repugnant christians other than their will to decieve people.
Typical bushshit from this administration.
Typical bushshit from this administration.
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At first I thought maybe this would be a really good opportunity for Condolezza Rice to win support from many AA that felt as though she was merely a pupport for Pres. Bush. However, my mind was changed when I read that T.D. Jakes was involved. It seems like to me as though there ought to be a better way to get help to these African countries without religion being involved. I'd like to think that this is probably just another tactic to make the Republican party look good while the Democratic party just sits back talks about having plans, but never actually carries about any of them.
The more I think about it, the more it seems as if this is merely a ploy for Bush or whoever to pass on ideas under the guise of assisting countries in need of help.
After reading all that was said, I've come to the conclusion that if I ever want to pursue an argument without having to talk about the main topic, just keep coming up with totally irrelevant comments and insults to say.
The more I think about it, the more it seems as if this is merely a ploy for Bush or whoever to pass on ideas under the guise of assisting countries in need of help.
After reading all that was said, I've come to the conclusion that if I ever want to pursue an argument without having to talk about the main topic, just keep coming up with totally irrelevant comments and insults to say.
If anyone is looking for the particle that Dolemite was referring to earlier, here's a copy of it and a link to it.
http://www.africancultureonline.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7682#post7682
A U.S. Faith Initiative for Africa
By Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger Times Staff WritersSun May 29, 7:55 AM ET
WASHINGTON — Escalating its courtship of a politically powerful constituency, the Bush administration is teaming up with some of the nation's best-known and most influential black clergy to craft a new role for U.S. churches in Africa.
The effort was launched last week, when more than two dozen leading African American religious figures met privately with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior White House officials at the State Department, according to administration officials and meeting participants.
The hourlong session focused largely on how the administration's faith-based initiative could be expanded to combat the spread of HIV and provide help for tens of millions of children orphaned by the epidemic across Africa.
Some of the pastors said it was a matter of national security — that those orphans were susceptible to recruitment by Islamic extremists unless they could be exposed to churches such as theirs.
The gathering yielded no formal financial commitment from the federal government for the Africa effort. But participants said it marked a new era of engagement by black clergy with U.S. foreign policy.
The Rev. O'Neal Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., and a longtime Republican, said Rice's decision to huddle with the pastors gave them a "mandate" to craft Africa policy. He said the group had laid plans to meet again soon with State Department officials.
A senior aide to Rice, James Wilkinson, said the meeting reflected her belief that more African American organizations "need to get involved in the president's Africa agenda." Administration officials described it as a natural step in an Africa policy that has gained heightened priority under Bush in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and in the face of the growing AIDS epidemic.
If it goes forward, the collaboration could result in a substantial expansion of black church participation in the faith-based initiative, from a largely domestic focus to a broader overseas portfolio that pastors believe could make hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars available for the churches to combat AIDS and related social ills internationally.
Rice and the pastors discussed the possibility of establishing an office of faith-based initiatives within the State Department that would direct federal funds for overseas aid to church and community groups, as similar offices have done in other Cabinet agencies.
The meeting reflected the expanding relationship between some of the country's best-known black clergy and the Bush administration — a relationship that has been nurtured through a White House program that encourages funneling government grants to religious charities.
Illustrating the political benefit of that relationship, White House officials injected some Capitol Hill strategy into the session. They solicited support among the black pastors for controversial legislation that would allow faith-based charities in the U.S. to discriminate in hiring based on an applicant's religious beliefs — a provision that has spurred opposition from some Democrats and civil rights groups.
"Compassion has a way of cutting across partisan lines," said James Towey, the top White House official in charge of the faith-based programs, who asked the pastors to sign a letter endorsing the legislation.
But rather than lowering partisan suspicions, the meeting raised them. The high-level session occurred the same day that the all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus conducted a long-planned outreach meeting with 200 black pastors from across the country seeking to solidify bonds between the Democrats and religious leaders. Some saw the State Department meeting as an effort to upstage the black caucus.
It was the latest sign of increasingly fierce competition between Republicans and Democrats for the support of religious voters, in this case a key element of the Democratic base.
Though past White House meetings have drawn mostly Republican-leaning pastors, the State Department session was broader, attracting longtime Democrats such as Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor and onetime United Nations ambassador, and administration critics such as the Rev. William J. Shaw, head of the National Baptist Convention.
The meeting was dominated, however, by evangelical pastors — many of them, like Bishops T.D. Jakes of Dallas and Charles E. Blake of Los Angeles, known to national television audiences.
White House strategists view black ministers as a path into a voter bloc that has traditionally been Democratic but is conservative on social issues such as abortion, school vouchers and same-sex marriage.
A relatively small group of sympathetic pastors has enjoyed extraordinary access to Bush and his top aides. Now, as the GOP outreach grows wider and more aggressive, some Democrats accuse the White House of expanding the promise of government grants to woo political support.
"I am concerned that this may be another enticement offered by the administration to African American clergy along the lines of the faith-based initiative," said Rep. Major R. Owens (news, bio, voting record) (D-N.Y.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Sending U.S. grants to well-established faith-based groups in Africa such as Catholic Relief Services is nothing new. But a former diplomat who handled Africa policy under President Clinton expressed concern about an initiative that might favor denominations that were politically friendly to the administration.
"There is a huge pressing need for care for AIDS orphans," said Susan Rice, now a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. Noting that past high-level meetings had been dominated by African American churches sympathetic to the White House, she said: "It's important to involve mainline African American denominations … so that the effort is not viewed solely as an effort at Republican Party base-building."
Brett Schaefer, an expert on Africa and foreign aid for the conservative Heritage Foundation, applauded the idea of engaging more black churches in the fight against AIDS in Africa. But he questioned the wisdom of using the program to counter Islamic extremism. "The U.S. should be careful that these projects … be focused on actual assistance rather than proselytizing," he said.
Several ministers at the State Department meeting signed the letter distributed by Towey endorsing the White House-backed provision on religious hiring, giving the administration a weapon to neutralize opposition to the measure when it comes before the Senate as early as next month.
The pastors' support "will be very influential," Towey said in an interview. "They speak with authority on the issue, and they are listened to by a lot of the members [of Congress] that are Democrats."
The discussion left at least one minister at the Rice meeting with mixed feelings. Shaw, head of the National Baptist Convention and pastor of a church in Philadelphia, said he refused to sign the letter, calling it a "political move." He also said he was pleased to hear about Bush's Africa agenda but was worried that the administration's outreach was more about politics than substance.
"I don't think [the Africa effort] ought to become simply another exercise of political operations," said Shaw, whose National Baptist Convention is the largest and oldest African American church denomination, with more than 7.5 million members. "I am not closed to it…. I need to see what fruitful comes from it and how nonpolitical it is."
The meeting's guest list seemed like a who's who of African American religious leaders. Blake is head of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, whose 24,000 members include celebrities such as Denzel Washington and Stevie Wonder. Jakes, who has been a regular at White House meetings, leads Potter's House Ministry in Dallas, which reaches millions through television broadcasts and massive conferences.
Perhaps the most unlikely guest was Young, a former aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and past president of the liberal National Council of Churches. Young surprised the audience when he rose to offer an emotional tribute to Rice. Young said it would have been unthinkable during the days of the civil rights struggle to imagine that Rice, a black preacher's daughter from the segregated South, would become the nation's top diplomat.
Young, who traveled overseas after the meeting, could not be reached for comment.
Several of the pastors said that interest was growing among their congregants in taking more responsibility for Africa's welfare.
"We encourage churches to adopt Africa as a priority, just as Israel is a priority for Jewish Americans," Blake, founder and director of the Pan African Children's Fund, said in an interview after the White House meeting.
Blake presented literature for Rice and the White House, explaining what he called the "Pan Africa movement" and the work his organization did to help AIDS orphans. He cited the potential benefits that an expanded U.S. church effort would have on the war on terrorism in countries such as Sudan, Nigeria and Kenya, where cells of Islamic extremists have been tracked. The millions of orphans in those countries are "susceptible to recruitment" by terrorists and their sympathizers, Blake wrote.
In many ways, the differences over the discrimination issue — and the dueling meetings in Washington last week — illuminated the larger tug of war in national politics for the sympathies of black clergy and, ultimately, the electoral support of their congregations.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman maintains a heavy schedule of meetings with black religious and political leaders and travels nearly every week to speak at historically black colleges. In addition, African American pastors are being courted by white evangelical church leaders, including the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition and James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who seek — and find — allies for their opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights.
In the first years of the Bush administration, many Democratic strategists dismissed the Republican outreach to blacks as pandering. But they no longer wave off its potential.
Some analysts maintain that the GOP's success in boosting the black vote for Bush in Ohio last year from 9% to 16% — an increase attributed to outreach to black pastors — secured the president's reelection. To fight back, the Democrats and their allies have launched an array of countermeasures, including last week's conference with ministers and the Congressional Black Caucus.
"We did not want these ministers to be in a position where they come to Washington, meet with the White House and just pass the black caucus," said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who is heading the group's outreach to pastors.
Cummings said the caucus was establishing regional forums, which would begin this summer, to educate clergy on national issues.
This month, a separate organization of black ministers backed by the liberal group People for the American Way met to mobilize black church opposition to President Bush's judicial nominees.
The group met May 6 at the Washington Hilton hotel to hear Democratic leaders, members of the Congressional Black Caucus staff and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People blast Bush administration policies.
The leader of the black ministers' group, the Rev. Timothy McDonald III of Atlanta, said the effort was necessary to build a "countervailing force" against efforts by the GOP and their allies to woo black church leaders.
"We're losing ministers every week," McDonald said.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has hired three new staffers to reach out to faith-based groups, including African American constituencies.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has also joined in the effort. In a January speech at Boston's Azusa Christian Community Church, Clinton gave an endorsement of the faith-based initiative that sounded as though she were reading from a Bush White House script.
"We cannot come in, through the government, and dictate to faith-based organizations how they should best minister in their streets, and in their churches, and in their synagogues and mosques," she said. "We need to not have a false division or debate about the role of faith-based institutions; we need to just do it and provide the support that is needed on an ongoing basis."
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Guest list
These religious leaders were among the more than two dozen who met last week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior White House officials.
Bishop T.D. Jakes
An author of bestselling books, Jakes is also a Grammy-winning gospel singer who was the subject of a 2001 Time magazine cover story titled "Is this the Next Billy Graham?" His Potter's House church in Dallas has 30,000 members, and his sermons are broadcast nationally.
The Rev. Donnie McClurkin
When he is not ministering to congregants at Perfecting Faith Church in a former supermarket in Freeport, N.Y., McClurkin performs, occasionally sharing the stage with music stars. McClurkin is a Pentecostal minister and a Grammy-winning gospel singer whose work has crossed over to mainstream audiences.
The Rev. Eugene Rivers
Pastor of Boston's Azusa Christian Community, Rivers earned national attention for his work combating youth crime. He is an advocate of Pentecostal activism and its entry into Africa. Rivers has been a visitor to the White House under Presidents Bush and Clinton.
Bishop Charles E. Blake
A member of the 12-person board of the Church of God in Christ, a denomination with more than 5 million members, Blake launched an organization providing aid to African children. He is the pastor of West Angeles Church of God and Christ in Los Angeles, whose 24,000-member congregation includes celebrities.
Bishop Eddie Long
Senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Long has an international following. He is a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage and led a march in Atlanta advocating a constitutional amendment to ban such unions. His TV show "Taking Authority" is broadcast in more than 100 countries.
The Rev. Andrew Young
The pastor, whose previous posts include ambassador to the U.N., Democratic congressman and mayor of Atlanta, has long been at the center of national and international civil rights struggles. He serves as a director of several major corporations and leads GoodWorks International, a consulting firm that promotes economic development in Africa and the Caribbean.
The Rev. William J. Shaw
The Philadelphia minister presides over the National Baptist Convention, a long-standing organization that has had missions in Africa since the 19th century. Shaw has been a critic of the Bush administration, opposing the war in Iraq and the president's proposed overhaul of Social Security.
Bishop Sedgwick Daniels
Bush had the backing of the pastor in the 2004 election. Daniels presides over Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ, a fast-growing church in Milwaukee that has gained notice from Republican and Democratic candidates.
The Rev. Herbert Hoover Lusk II
The senior pastor of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Lusk is a former star running back for Cal State Long Beach who later played for the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles. His church biography calls him an advisor to Bush.
The Rev. Frank Madison Reid III Reid is the senior pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a fast-growing church in Baltimore. A fifth-generation minister with degrees from Harvard and Yale, Reid became one of the first AME church leaders to have a syndicated television program, "Outreach of Love," which has been broadcast nationally for a decade.
Copyright © 2005 Los Angeles Times
http://www.africancultureonline.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7682#post7682
A U.S. Faith Initiative for Africa
By Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger Times Staff WritersSun May 29, 7:55 AM ET
WASHINGTON — Escalating its courtship of a politically powerful constituency, the Bush administration is teaming up with some of the nation's best-known and most influential black clergy to craft a new role for U.S. churches in Africa.
The effort was launched last week, when more than two dozen leading African American religious figures met privately with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior White House officials at the State Department, according to administration officials and meeting participants.
The hourlong session focused largely on how the administration's faith-based initiative could be expanded to combat the spread of HIV and provide help for tens of millions of children orphaned by the epidemic across Africa.
Some of the pastors said it was a matter of national security — that those orphans were susceptible to recruitment by Islamic extremists unless they could be exposed to churches such as theirs.
The gathering yielded no formal financial commitment from the federal government for the Africa effort. But participants said it marked a new era of engagement by black clergy with U.S. foreign policy.
The Rev. O'Neal Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., and a longtime Republican, said Rice's decision to huddle with the pastors gave them a "mandate" to craft Africa policy. He said the group had laid plans to meet again soon with State Department officials.
A senior aide to Rice, James Wilkinson, said the meeting reflected her belief that more African American organizations "need to get involved in the president's Africa agenda." Administration officials described it as a natural step in an Africa policy that has gained heightened priority under Bush in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and in the face of the growing AIDS epidemic.
If it goes forward, the collaboration could result in a substantial expansion of black church participation in the faith-based initiative, from a largely domestic focus to a broader overseas portfolio that pastors believe could make hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars available for the churches to combat AIDS and related social ills internationally.
Rice and the pastors discussed the possibility of establishing an office of faith-based initiatives within the State Department that would direct federal funds for overseas aid to church and community groups, as similar offices have done in other Cabinet agencies.
The meeting reflected the expanding relationship between some of the country's best-known black clergy and the Bush administration — a relationship that has been nurtured through a White House program that encourages funneling government grants to religious charities.
Illustrating the political benefit of that relationship, White House officials injected some Capitol Hill strategy into the session. They solicited support among the black pastors for controversial legislation that would allow faith-based charities in the U.S. to discriminate in hiring based on an applicant's religious beliefs — a provision that has spurred opposition from some Democrats and civil rights groups.
"Compassion has a way of cutting across partisan lines," said James Towey, the top White House official in charge of the faith-based programs, who asked the pastors to sign a letter endorsing the legislation.
But rather than lowering partisan suspicions, the meeting raised them. The high-level session occurred the same day that the all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus conducted a long-planned outreach meeting with 200 black pastors from across the country seeking to solidify bonds between the Democrats and religious leaders. Some saw the State Department meeting as an effort to upstage the black caucus.
It was the latest sign of increasingly fierce competition between Republicans and Democrats for the support of religious voters, in this case a key element of the Democratic base.
Though past White House meetings have drawn mostly Republican-leaning pastors, the State Department session was broader, attracting longtime Democrats such as Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor and onetime United Nations ambassador, and administration critics such as the Rev. William J. Shaw, head of the National Baptist Convention.
The meeting was dominated, however, by evangelical pastors — many of them, like Bishops T.D. Jakes of Dallas and Charles E. Blake of Los Angeles, known to national television audiences.
White House strategists view black ministers as a path into a voter bloc that has traditionally been Democratic but is conservative on social issues such as abortion, school vouchers and same-sex marriage.
A relatively small group of sympathetic pastors has enjoyed extraordinary access to Bush and his top aides. Now, as the GOP outreach grows wider and more aggressive, some Democrats accuse the White House of expanding the promise of government grants to woo political support.
"I am concerned that this may be another enticement offered by the administration to African American clergy along the lines of the faith-based initiative," said Rep. Major R. Owens (news, bio, voting record) (D-N.Y.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Sending U.S. grants to well-established faith-based groups in Africa such as Catholic Relief Services is nothing new. But a former diplomat who handled Africa policy under President Clinton expressed concern about an initiative that might favor denominations that were politically friendly to the administration.
"There is a huge pressing need for care for AIDS orphans," said Susan Rice, now a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. Noting that past high-level meetings had been dominated by African American churches sympathetic to the White House, she said: "It's important to involve mainline African American denominations … so that the effort is not viewed solely as an effort at Republican Party base-building."
Brett Schaefer, an expert on Africa and foreign aid for the conservative Heritage Foundation, applauded the idea of engaging more black churches in the fight against AIDS in Africa. But he questioned the wisdom of using the program to counter Islamic extremism. "The U.S. should be careful that these projects … be focused on actual assistance rather than proselytizing," he said.
Several ministers at the State Department meeting signed the letter distributed by Towey endorsing the White House-backed provision on religious hiring, giving the administration a weapon to neutralize opposition to the measure when it comes before the Senate as early as next month.
The pastors' support "will be very influential," Towey said in an interview. "They speak with authority on the issue, and they are listened to by a lot of the members [of Congress] that are Democrats."
The discussion left at least one minister at the Rice meeting with mixed feelings. Shaw, head of the National Baptist Convention and pastor of a church in Philadelphia, said he refused to sign the letter, calling it a "political move." He also said he was pleased to hear about Bush's Africa agenda but was worried that the administration's outreach was more about politics than substance.
"I don't think [the Africa effort] ought to become simply another exercise of political operations," said Shaw, whose National Baptist Convention is the largest and oldest African American church denomination, with more than 7.5 million members. "I am not closed to it…. I need to see what fruitful comes from it and how nonpolitical it is."
The meeting's guest list seemed like a who's who of African American religious leaders. Blake is head of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, whose 24,000 members include celebrities such as Denzel Washington and Stevie Wonder. Jakes, who has been a regular at White House meetings, leads Potter's House Ministry in Dallas, which reaches millions through television broadcasts and massive conferences.
Perhaps the most unlikely guest was Young, a former aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and past president of the liberal National Council of Churches. Young surprised the audience when he rose to offer an emotional tribute to Rice. Young said it would have been unthinkable during the days of the civil rights struggle to imagine that Rice, a black preacher's daughter from the segregated South, would become the nation's top diplomat.
Young, who traveled overseas after the meeting, could not be reached for comment.
Several of the pastors said that interest was growing among their congregants in taking more responsibility for Africa's welfare.
"We encourage churches to adopt Africa as a priority, just as Israel is a priority for Jewish Americans," Blake, founder and director of the Pan African Children's Fund, said in an interview after the White House meeting.
Blake presented literature for Rice and the White House, explaining what he called the "Pan Africa movement" and the work his organization did to help AIDS orphans. He cited the potential benefits that an expanded U.S. church effort would have on the war on terrorism in countries such as Sudan, Nigeria and Kenya, where cells of Islamic extremists have been tracked. The millions of orphans in those countries are "susceptible to recruitment" by terrorists and their sympathizers, Blake wrote.
In many ways, the differences over the discrimination issue — and the dueling meetings in Washington last week — illuminated the larger tug of war in national politics for the sympathies of black clergy and, ultimately, the electoral support of their congregations.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman maintains a heavy schedule of meetings with black religious and political leaders and travels nearly every week to speak at historically black colleges. In addition, African American pastors are being courted by white evangelical church leaders, including the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition and James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who seek — and find — allies for their opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights.
In the first years of the Bush administration, many Democratic strategists dismissed the Republican outreach to blacks as pandering. But they no longer wave off its potential.
Some analysts maintain that the GOP's success in boosting the black vote for Bush in Ohio last year from 9% to 16% — an increase attributed to outreach to black pastors — secured the president's reelection. To fight back, the Democrats and their allies have launched an array of countermeasures, including last week's conference with ministers and the Congressional Black Caucus.
"We did not want these ministers to be in a position where they come to Washington, meet with the White House and just pass the black caucus," said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who is heading the group's outreach to pastors.
Cummings said the caucus was establishing regional forums, which would begin this summer, to educate clergy on national issues.
This month, a separate organization of black ministers backed by the liberal group People for the American Way met to mobilize black church opposition to President Bush's judicial nominees.
The group met May 6 at the Washington Hilton hotel to hear Democratic leaders, members of the Congressional Black Caucus staff and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People blast Bush administration policies.
The leader of the black ministers' group, the Rev. Timothy McDonald III of Atlanta, said the effort was necessary to build a "countervailing force" against efforts by the GOP and their allies to woo black church leaders.
"We're losing ministers every week," McDonald said.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has hired three new staffers to reach out to faith-based groups, including African American constituencies.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has also joined in the effort. In a January speech at Boston's Azusa Christian Community Church, Clinton gave an endorsement of the faith-based initiative that sounded as though she were reading from a Bush White House script.
"We cannot come in, through the government, and dictate to faith-based organizations how they should best minister in their streets, and in their churches, and in their synagogues and mosques," she said. "We need to not have a false division or debate about the role of faith-based institutions; we need to just do it and provide the support that is needed on an ongoing basis."
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Guest list
These religious leaders were among the more than two dozen who met last week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior White House officials.
Bishop T.D. Jakes
An author of bestselling books, Jakes is also a Grammy-winning gospel singer who was the subject of a 2001 Time magazine cover story titled "Is this the Next Billy Graham?" His Potter's House church in Dallas has 30,000 members, and his sermons are broadcast nationally.
The Rev. Donnie McClurkin
When he is not ministering to congregants at Perfecting Faith Church in a former supermarket in Freeport, N.Y., McClurkin performs, occasionally sharing the stage with music stars. McClurkin is a Pentecostal minister and a Grammy-winning gospel singer whose work has crossed over to mainstream audiences.
The Rev. Eugene Rivers
Pastor of Boston's Azusa Christian Community, Rivers earned national attention for his work combating youth crime. He is an advocate of Pentecostal activism and its entry into Africa. Rivers has been a visitor to the White House under Presidents Bush and Clinton.
Bishop Charles E. Blake
A member of the 12-person board of the Church of God in Christ, a denomination with more than 5 million members, Blake launched an organization providing aid to African children. He is the pastor of West Angeles Church of God and Christ in Los Angeles, whose 24,000-member congregation includes celebrities.
Bishop Eddie Long
Senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, Long has an international following. He is a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage and led a march in Atlanta advocating a constitutional amendment to ban such unions. His TV show "Taking Authority" is broadcast in more than 100 countries.
The Rev. Andrew Young
The pastor, whose previous posts include ambassador to the U.N., Democratic congressman and mayor of Atlanta, has long been at the center of national and international civil rights struggles. He serves as a director of several major corporations and leads GoodWorks International, a consulting firm that promotes economic development in Africa and the Caribbean.
The Rev. William J. Shaw
The Philadelphia minister presides over the National Baptist Convention, a long-standing organization that has had missions in Africa since the 19th century. Shaw has been a critic of the Bush administration, opposing the war in Iraq and the president's proposed overhaul of Social Security.
Bishop Sedgwick Daniels
Bush had the backing of the pastor in the 2004 election. Daniels presides over Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ, a fast-growing church in Milwaukee that has gained notice from Republican and Democratic candidates.
The Rev. Herbert Hoover Lusk II
The senior pastor of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Lusk is a former star running back for Cal State Long Beach who later played for the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles. His church biography calls him an advisor to Bush.
The Rev. Frank Madison Reid III Reid is the senior pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a fast-growing church in Baltimore. A fifth-generation minister with degrees from Harvard and Yale, Reid became one of the first AME church leaders to have a syndicated television program, "Outreach of Love," which has been broadcast nationally for a decade.
Copyright © 2005 Los Angeles Times
QueEx said:
A former White House official said yesterday that President Bush has failed to deliver on his promise to help religious groups serve the poor, the homeless and drug addicts because the administration lacks a genuine commitment to its "compassionate conservative" agenda.
Based on my observation, which is different from yours. The single most powerful groups within the AA community are the black churches, which ironically and collectively have done the least over the last 8 years. Smaller less religious organizations have done more, although the individual leaders of those small organizations may be religion based, the organized churches are more concerned with growth and money. There are million dollar a week churches in run down neighborhoods in many major cities. Much like the drug dealers minus the violently destructive side effects, the "vapiarism" of these organizations have been nearly as bad. I can see why the fictitious Bush christians in DC see this as a vessel to perpertrate their continuous fraud on the Amerikkkan people, AA, and now the new target Africa. They just need black faces other than Condi's in Africa. Bush people know that much of Africa is Islamic an they may see WHITE Christians as the threat that they really are, therefore a few more black folks may get more ground.
This is why you don't see a COLLECTIVE movement in Amerikkka by the black churches. GREEDY people are only concerned about themselves, hence, the Repugnants attraction to the black churches, they know what type of leadership is involved with a lot of them, much like this administration. Look at what Havoc posted....OK!
Ideally their agenda in DC is not about helping Africa, we know this. I think its an attempt to persuade AA here to support whatever endeavor they have planned for Africa after the Islamic people reject the Christian ideology, even from black people. Not even the black churches (most powerful black groups) will defend Africans that reject Christianity. Bombs awayyyyy. Think about it.
Your statement wasn't limited to the last 8 years. Without question, the Black church has not been what it has been, but I suspect that is from a variety of causes, including, as you mentioned the million-dollar-do-nothings, and I would venture to guess, a myriad of other causes as well. My point, however, was to the blanket statement, without any qualification. Truth of the matter is, none of the traditional sources of leadership in our community have stepped up very well.CAPTAIN said:
QueEx
QueEx said:
...but its not the traditional sources of leadership that is being pursued. You are correct, my statement wasn't clear in the first post, on the time frame which I had in my mind, that's my fault. In no way does that invalidate the number of questions about this action of the administration, does it?
I think Bush is banking on recruiting the million-dollar-do-nothings. If they can't do crap here for their own people then how in the heck would they accomplish anything abroad in a Muslim country while under the authority of an anti-black administration? This all smells like more "MWD" to me.
Frankly, I think this whole recruitment idea is more than interesting. In fact, it is interested me since Bush first proposed his faith-based initiatives. I see the recruitment as a "Test" -- of the will of certain aspects of our community. Do those who go for the recruitment efforts take what might be good and use it to develop the community; or, do they buy into the program, just to get the money to misuse and try to sell the rest of us the rhetoric ??? I can't blame the former while the latter I hold in disdain. I'm waiting to see who makes a move and why.CAPTAIN said:... I think Bush is banking on recruiting the million-dollar-do-nothings. If they can't do crap here for their own people then how in the heck would they accomplish anything abroad in a Muslim country while under the authority of an anti-black administration? This all smells like more "MWD" to me.
Like you, however, I would like to see Bush practice what he preaches (development wise), at home (in our community).
QueEx
QueEx said:
Here is what I think this may be a continuation of, much like the Iraq war. He's finishing what daddy started. Infiltration 101!
<iframe src="http://www.afrocentricnews.com/html/bush_africa_control.html" scrolling="auto" frameborder="no" align="center" height = "950px" width = "800px"></iframe>
I wouldn't dare disagree with your suspicions. Through my own attempts at objectivity, there lingers in my mind the understanding that there are those within this country in powerful places occupying their own Axis of Evil. But when it comes to using this motley crew of Black ministers to accomplish a grand scheme in Africa or anywhere else, my comfort level rises because they have their own baggage in this country and I refuse to believe that there aren't poor-but-smart people in Africa who aren't as stupid as they are. 
QueEx
QueEx
<font size="6"><center>Bush accused of Aids damage to Africa</font size></center>
Jeevan Vasagar and agencies in Nairobi
and Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday August 30, 2005
The Guardian
A senior United Nations official has accused President George Bush of "doing damage to Africa" by cutting funding for condoms, a move which may jeopardise the successful fight against HIV/Aids in Uganda.
Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general's special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, said US cuts in funding for condoms and an emphasis on promoting abstinence had contributed to a shortage of condoms in Uganda, one of the few African countries which has succeeded in reducing its infection rate.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven by [US policies]," Mr Lewis said yesterday. "To impose a dogma-driven policy that is fundamentally flawed is doing damage to Africa."
The condom shortage has developed because both the Ugandan government and the US, which is the main donor for HIV/Aids prevention, have allowed supplies to dwindle, according to an American pressure group, the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (Change).
In 2003, President Bush declared he would spend $15bn on his emergency plan for Aids relief, but receiving aid under the programme has moral strings attached.
Recipient countries have to emphasise abstinence over condoms, and - under a congressional amendment - they must condemn prostitution.
Brazil announced last month that it would refuse to accept $40m (£22m) in American aid rather than stigmatise prostitutes who Brazilian health workers said were essential to their anti-Aids strategy. Senegal was also cut off from US aid because prostitution is legal there.
Campaigners accuse Uganda's first lady, Janet Museveni, of being instrumental in the switch towards a policy of abstinence. Ugandan government officials say that her religious beliefs, stemming from being a born-again Christian, are central to her promotion of the message of abstinence. In one poster campaign, signed by the office of the first lady, the slogan alongside the picture of a smiling young woman says: "She's saving herself for marriage - how about you?"
While Uganda needs between 120m and 150m condoms a year, only 32m have been distributed since last October, Change said in a report published yesterday.
Meanwhile, religious groups that oppose condom use are receiving an increased share of funding, the pressure group says. "Religious fundamentalists, some financially supported by the US government and the office of the first lady, Janet Museveni, have become prominent in attacking condoms and those who distribute them," Change's report said.
Officially, Uganda remains committed to the threefold "ABC" policy. The initials stand for "Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom". The Ugandan government denied yesterday that there is a scarcity of condoms or a policy change. The health minister, Jim Muhwezi, said: "It is not true that there is a condom shortage. There seems to be a coordinated smear campaign by those who do not want to use any other alternative simultaneously with condoms against Aids."
The minister insisted that condoms remain an important part of their HIV prevention strategy, but said the first lady could not be expected to promote the use of contraceptives. "Her role is to tell the young people to abstain. She cannot tell young people to use condoms, she is a mother," he said.
Uganda has had extraordinary success in reducing adult infection rates from 30% in the early 1990s to below 6% last year. This success is largely credited to its president, Yoweri Museveni, who spoke out about what was considered a shameful disease and told people how to combat it.
The row over Uganda's HIV/Aids strategy comes at a time when the financial management of the country's Aids programmes is under the spotlight. Last week the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria pulled all its funding from Uganda's programmes. After an inquiry by accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Global Fund suspended five grants worth $201m over two years and demanded that the unit within the Ugandan ministry of health that manages them should be disbanded.
An American Aids official last night denied that the US had forced Uganda to reduce the condoms available, saying the Bush administration supported condom use as part of a balanced programme that included prevention.
"The statements that I have heard are completely untrue and completely mischaracterise effective prevention programmes," Mark Dybul, deputy US global Aids coordinator and chief medical officer, told Reuters by telephone.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1558905,00.html
Jeevan Vasagar and agencies in Nairobi
and Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday August 30, 2005
The Guardian
A senior United Nations official has accused President George Bush of "doing damage to Africa" by cutting funding for condoms, a move which may jeopardise the successful fight against HIV/Aids in Uganda.
Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general's special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, said US cuts in funding for condoms and an emphasis on promoting abstinence had contributed to a shortage of condoms in Uganda, one of the few African countries which has succeeded in reducing its infection rate.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven by [US policies]," Mr Lewis said yesterday. "To impose a dogma-driven policy that is fundamentally flawed is doing damage to Africa."
The condom shortage has developed because both the Ugandan government and the US, which is the main donor for HIV/Aids prevention, have allowed supplies to dwindle, according to an American pressure group, the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (Change).
In 2003, President Bush declared he would spend $15bn on his emergency plan for Aids relief, but receiving aid under the programme has moral strings attached.
Recipient countries have to emphasise abstinence over condoms, and - under a congressional amendment - they must condemn prostitution.
Brazil announced last month that it would refuse to accept $40m (£22m) in American aid rather than stigmatise prostitutes who Brazilian health workers said were essential to their anti-Aids strategy. Senegal was also cut off from US aid because prostitution is legal there.
Campaigners accuse Uganda's first lady, Janet Museveni, of being instrumental in the switch towards a policy of abstinence. Ugandan government officials say that her religious beliefs, stemming from being a born-again Christian, are central to her promotion of the message of abstinence. In one poster campaign, signed by the office of the first lady, the slogan alongside the picture of a smiling young woman says: "She's saving herself for marriage - how about you?"
While Uganda needs between 120m and 150m condoms a year, only 32m have been distributed since last October, Change said in a report published yesterday.
Meanwhile, religious groups that oppose condom use are receiving an increased share of funding, the pressure group says. "Religious fundamentalists, some financially supported by the US government and the office of the first lady, Janet Museveni, have become prominent in attacking condoms and those who distribute them," Change's report said.
Officially, Uganda remains committed to the threefold "ABC" policy. The initials stand for "Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom". The Ugandan government denied yesterday that there is a scarcity of condoms or a policy change. The health minister, Jim Muhwezi, said: "It is not true that there is a condom shortage. There seems to be a coordinated smear campaign by those who do not want to use any other alternative simultaneously with condoms against Aids."
The minister insisted that condoms remain an important part of their HIV prevention strategy, but said the first lady could not be expected to promote the use of contraceptives. "Her role is to tell the young people to abstain. She cannot tell young people to use condoms, she is a mother," he said.
Uganda has had extraordinary success in reducing adult infection rates from 30% in the early 1990s to below 6% last year. This success is largely credited to its president, Yoweri Museveni, who spoke out about what was considered a shameful disease and told people how to combat it.
The row over Uganda's HIV/Aids strategy comes at a time when the financial management of the country's Aids programmes is under the spotlight. Last week the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria pulled all its funding from Uganda's programmes. After an inquiry by accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Global Fund suspended five grants worth $201m over two years and demanded that the unit within the Ugandan ministry of health that manages them should be disbanded.
An American Aids official last night denied that the US had forced Uganda to reduce the condoms available, saying the Bush administration supported condom use as part of a balanced programme that included prevention.
"The statements that I have heard are completely untrue and completely mischaracterise effective prevention programmes," Mark Dybul, deputy US global Aids coordinator and chief medical officer, told Reuters by telephone.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1558905,00.html
<font size="5"><center>US Denies Pressuring Uganda To Change AIDS Policy</font size></center>
By Joe De Capua
Washington
30 August 2005
The Bush Administration has rejected allegations it’s pressuring the Ugandan government to promote abstinence over condom use in preventing HIV/AIDS. It also denies its policies have contributed to a reported condom shortage in Uganda.
Dr. Mark Dybul, Deputy US Global AIDS Coordinator, denies the United States is exerting any pressure on Uganda to change its AIDS prevention approach. He says, "Nothing could be more absurd."
Dr. Dybul says the Bush Administration supports Uganda’s ABC prevention system.
"Fifteen years ago, long before it became fashionable for international organizations to pop into Uganda for a couple of days and tell them how to run their country, the Ugandans developed what’s known as ABC – abstain, be faithful and, if you can’t do either, correct and consistent use of condoms. This approach has been remarkably successful by all documentation," he says.
He says it’s true the Bush Administration is now stressing A & B – abstinence and being faithful - because an overemphasis has been placed on C, condom use, in some areas. Dr. Dybul says that’s to ensure there’s a balanced ABC approach in the country.
"In concentrated epidemics, where the infection is concentrated among prostitutes, drug users, truckers, condom-only approaches tend to work fairly well because you have a concentrated group of people. In a generalized epidemic, which is what we see in Uganda, throughout all of Africa, where the infection is already in the general community, only an ABC approach works. Condoms-only is a failed, failed approach," he says.
In a news conference, UN special envoy Stephen Lewis, and AIDS activists, took aim at PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
"There is no question in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven and exacerbated by PEPFAR and by the extreme policies that the administration in the United States is now pursuing in the emphasis on abstinence far and away beyond that of condoms, " he says.
Mr. Lewis calls it a “distortion of the preventive apparatus of ABC.” He adds, “It’s causing “great damage” and says it will lead to more HIV infections.
The Deputy US Global AIDS Coordinator, Dr. Dybul, denies US policy contributed to a condom shortfall in Uganda. He says it was clearly a case of a questionable product being on the market.
"The difficulty in Uganda is because a large batch of condoms that was ordered in Uganda smelled bad and people complained about them. They were tested and found to have a lot of holes in them. So they had to pull them from the market, which is good public health strategy. You have a bad commodity on the market, you pull it from the market, same thing we do in the United States or anywhere else in the world. It is preposterous to say that a policy of ABC led to the production of bad condoms," he says.
Later tests showed the condoms to be safe but public confidence in the brand, Engabu, was extremely low after the bad publicity. AIDS activists accuse the Ugandan government of not acting quickly enough to obtain more condoms. They say government clinics no longer offer free condoms, and those that can be purchased have tripled in price.
The Bush Administration says it has sent large amounts of condoms to Uganda to deal with the problem, and that they are awaiting the country’s quality control testing.The Administration also denies most of the PEPFAR money goes to faith-based organizations. However, it highly praises such organizations, saying they should receive more aid and that the pandemic cannot be defeated without their help.
Note: Above audio links include full interview with Dr. Dybul, beginning with his denial the US is pressuring Ugandan government.
http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/2005-08-30-voa43.cfm
By Joe De Capua
Washington
30 August 2005
The Bush Administration has rejected allegations it’s pressuring the Ugandan government to promote abstinence over condom use in preventing HIV/AIDS. It also denies its policies have contributed to a reported condom shortage in Uganda.
Dr. Mark Dybul, Deputy US Global AIDS Coordinator, denies the United States is exerting any pressure on Uganda to change its AIDS prevention approach. He says, "Nothing could be more absurd."
Dr. Dybul says the Bush Administration supports Uganda’s ABC prevention system.
"Fifteen years ago, long before it became fashionable for international organizations to pop into Uganda for a couple of days and tell them how to run their country, the Ugandans developed what’s known as ABC – abstain, be faithful and, if you can’t do either, correct and consistent use of condoms. This approach has been remarkably successful by all documentation," he says.
He says it’s true the Bush Administration is now stressing A & B – abstinence and being faithful - because an overemphasis has been placed on C, condom use, in some areas. Dr. Dybul says that’s to ensure there’s a balanced ABC approach in the country.
"In concentrated epidemics, where the infection is concentrated among prostitutes, drug users, truckers, condom-only approaches tend to work fairly well because you have a concentrated group of people. In a generalized epidemic, which is what we see in Uganda, throughout all of Africa, where the infection is already in the general community, only an ABC approach works. Condoms-only is a failed, failed approach," he says.
In a news conference, UN special envoy Stephen Lewis, and AIDS activists, took aim at PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
"There is no question in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven and exacerbated by PEPFAR and by the extreme policies that the administration in the United States is now pursuing in the emphasis on abstinence far and away beyond that of condoms, " he says.
Mr. Lewis calls it a “distortion of the preventive apparatus of ABC.” He adds, “It’s causing “great damage” and says it will lead to more HIV infections.
The Deputy US Global AIDS Coordinator, Dr. Dybul, denies US policy contributed to a condom shortfall in Uganda. He says it was clearly a case of a questionable product being on the market.
"The difficulty in Uganda is because a large batch of condoms that was ordered in Uganda smelled bad and people complained about them. They were tested and found to have a lot of holes in them. So they had to pull them from the market, which is good public health strategy. You have a bad commodity on the market, you pull it from the market, same thing we do in the United States or anywhere else in the world. It is preposterous to say that a policy of ABC led to the production of bad condoms," he says.
Later tests showed the condoms to be safe but public confidence in the brand, Engabu, was extremely low after the bad publicity. AIDS activists accuse the Ugandan government of not acting quickly enough to obtain more condoms. They say government clinics no longer offer free condoms, and those that can be purchased have tripled in price.
The Bush Administration says it has sent large amounts of condoms to Uganda to deal with the problem, and that they are awaiting the country’s quality control testing.The Administration also denies most of the PEPFAR money goes to faith-based organizations. However, it highly praises such organizations, saying they should receive more aid and that the pandemic cannot be defeated without their help.
Note: Above audio links include full interview with Dr. Dybul, beginning with his denial the US is pressuring Ugandan government.
http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/2005-08-30-voa43.cfm
<font size="5"><center>Religious Groups Get Chunk of AIDS Money</font size></center>
Jan 30, 2:52 AM (ET)
Associated Press
By RITA BEAMISH
New groups are springing up to win a piece of President Bush's $15 billion AIDS program, with traditional players and religious groups joining forces to improve their chances in a competition that already has targeted nearly a quarter of its grants for faith-based organizations.
The administration is putting out a call for new community and church groups to get involved in HIV prevention and care in 15 target countries, most in sub-Saharan Africa. It is reserving $200 million specifically for groups with little or no government grant experience.
Groups that have deep local ties in the countries and focus on abstinence and fidelity - instead of just condoms - are faring well.
"The notion that because people have always received aid money that they'll get money needs to end," Deputy Global AIDS coordinator Mark Dybul said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
"The only way to have sustainable programs is to have programs that are wholly owned in terms of management personnel at the local level."
Those on the ground in Africa say Bush's 3-year-old effort is reshaping prevention efforts.
"You have community organizations, some that have operated for decades, asking for money and you have lots of new organizations popping up," said Sarah Lucas, a development assistance expert who recently toured four countries on the U.S. target list for HIV/AIDS grants.
Award recipients so far include a Christian relief organization famous for its televised appeals to feed hungry children, a well-known Roman Catholic charity and a group run by the son of evangelist Billy Graham, according to the State Department.
The outreach to nontraditional AIDS players comes in the midst of a debate over how best to prevent the spread of HIV. The debate has activated groups on both ends of the political spectrum and created a vast competition for money.
Conservative Christian allies of the president are pressing the U.S. foreign aid agency to give fewer dollars to groups that distribute condoms or work with prostitutes.
Secular organizations in Africa are raising concerns that new money to groups without AIDS experience may dilute the impact of Bush's program.
"We clearly recognize that it is very important to work with faith-based organizations," said Dan Mullins, deputy regional director for southern and western Africa for CARE, one of the best-known humanitarian organizations.
"But at the same time we don't want to fall into the trap of assuming faith-based groups are good at everything," he added.
Religious organizations last year accounted for more than 23 percent of all groups that got HIV/AIDS grants, according to State Department estimates. Some 80 percent of all secular and religious grant recipients were based in the countries where the aid is targeted.
Among those winning grants were:
_Samaritan's Purse, which is run by Graham's son, Franklin. It says its mission is "meeting critical needs of victims of war, poverty, famine, disease and natural disaster while sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ."
_World Vision. The 56-year-old Christian organization is known for its TV appeals - some with celebrities such as game show host Alex Trebek - that asked people to support a Third World child.
_Catholic Relief Services. It was awarded $6.2 million to teach abstinence and fidelity in three countries; $335 million in a consortium providing antiretroviral treatment; and $9 million to help orphans and children affected by HIV/AIDs. The group offers "complete and correct information about condoms" but will not promote, purchase or distribute them, said Carl Stecker, senior program director for HIV/AIDS.
_HOPE. The global relief organization founded by the International Churches of Christ recently brought comedian Chris Rock to South Africa for an AIDS prevention event. AIDS grants support HOPE in several countries.
_World Relief, founded by the National Association of Evangelicals. It won $9.7 million for abstinence work in four countries.
Most of the money in Bush's initiative goes to treatment programs, earning the administration praise for delivering lifesaving drugs and care to millions of HIV-infected patients.
For prevention, Bush embraces the "ABC" strategy: abstinence before marriage, being faithful to one partner and condoms targeted for high-risk activity. The Republican-led Congress mandated that one-third of prevention money be reserved for abstinence and fidelity.
The U.S. government provided more than 560 million condoms abroad last year, compared with some 350 million in 2001.
Condom promotion to anyone must include abstinence and fidelity messages, U.S. guidelines say, but those preaching abstinence do not have to provide condom education.
The abstinence emphasis, say some longtime AIDS volunteers, has led to a confusing message and added to the stigma of condom use in parts of Africa. Village volunteers in Swaziland maintain a supply of free condoms but say they have few takers.
"This drive for abstinence is putting a lot of pressure on girls to get married earlier," said Dr. Abeja Apunyo, the Uganda representative for Pathfinder International, a reproductive health nonprofit group based in Massachusetts.
"For years now we have been trying to tell our daughters that they should finish their education and train in a profession before they get married. Otherwise they have few options if they find themselves separated from their husbands for some reason," Apunyo said.
An AIDS program pastor in Uganda explained his abstinence teaching to unmarried young people.
"Why give an alternative and have them take a risk?" asked the Rev. Sam Lawrence Ruteikara of the Anglican Church of Uganda, a U.S. grant recipient. "This person doesn't have a sexual partner, so why should I report too much, saying that in case you get a sexual partner, please use a condom. I am saying, please don't get a sexual partner - don't get involved because it is risky."
U.S.-backed programs have spread abstinence and faithfulness education to more than 13 million people in Uganda, according to the State Department. Officials promote the nation as an "ABC" model, with its HIV infection rate down by more than half in a decade.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said that on a tour of Uganda in January he saw pro-abstinence rallies and skits praising Bush, and U.S.-supported groups conducting house-to-house testing, care and counseling.
"The good news about the faith-based groups is not only the passion they bring to the work, but it is the moral authority and the extended numbers of volunteers they can mobilize to get the word out," Smith said.
But Smith believes the administration is wrongly supporting some nonprofit groups. He and several other congressional conservatives wrote to Bush and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, contending that several large grant recipients were pro-prostitution, pro-abortion and not committed enough to abstinence priorities.
The letters followed a briefing last year by Focus on the Family, run by Christian commentator James Dobson. The group's sexual health analyst, Linda Klepacki, said even some religious groups emphasize condoms over abstinence.
"We have to be careful that the president's original intent is being followed where A and B (abstinence and faithfulness) are the emphasized areas of the ABC methodology," she said.
Six congressional Democrats, in a letter last week to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, accused the conservatives of a distortion campaign that undermines a balanced approach to fighting AIDS.
"Their attack is based on a narrow, ideological viewpoint that condemns condoms and frames any attempt to reach out to high-risk populations as an endorsement of behaviors that these critics oppose," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
USAID has declined to renew funding for two major AIDS-fighting consortiums, CORE and IMPACT, headed by organizations the conservatives targeted.
CORE, whose lead partner is CARE, is losing its central source of money, meaning its work survives only if it can win grants from individual USAID missions in target countries.
Family Health International, the lead organization of IMPACT, brought hundreds of local and religious groups into its $441 million project, but was told the administration wants new partners, said Sheila Mitchell, senior vice president of FHI's Institute for HIV/AIDS.
Dybul said the changes are in keeping with the shift to local groups. Any suggestion of political motivation is "inaccurate and offensive to people doing this work," he said. Millions of grant dollars still go to the groups that were criticized.
One grant was delayed when Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., complained last year about renewing $14 million to Population Services International, a leading nonprofit condom distributor.
The group's bingo-style games that teach Guatemalan prostitutes about safe sex misused funds "to exploit victims of the sex trade," Coburn said. But Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, then wrote to praise PSI's work as "provably effective and efficient."
USAID divided the grant; condom distribution was separated into the smaller part so that religious groups could apply for the other part. PSI eventually won the larger grant. The second is outstanding.
Although administration critics frequently cite PSI as a group that fell from favor under the new initiative, "we have not been eviscerated," said Stewart Parkinson, a senior program analyst.
The group lost U.S. grants in Uganda and Tanzania but retained others. And Parkinson said he had no indication of political motivation.
---
Associated Press reporters Alexandra Zavis in South Africa, Thulani Mthethwa in Swaziland, Katy Pownall in Uganda and Lewis Mwanangombe in Zambia contributed to this report.
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20060130/D8FESBAO0.html?PG=home&SEC=news
Jan 30, 2:52 AM (ET)
Associated Press
By RITA BEAMISH
New groups are springing up to win a piece of President Bush's $15 billion AIDS program, with traditional players and religious groups joining forces to improve their chances in a competition that already has targeted nearly a quarter of its grants for faith-based organizations.
The administration is putting out a call for new community and church groups to get involved in HIV prevention and care in 15 target countries, most in sub-Saharan Africa. It is reserving $200 million specifically for groups with little or no government grant experience.
Groups that have deep local ties in the countries and focus on abstinence and fidelity - instead of just condoms - are faring well.
"The notion that because people have always received aid money that they'll get money needs to end," Deputy Global AIDS coordinator Mark Dybul said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
"The only way to have sustainable programs is to have programs that are wholly owned in terms of management personnel at the local level."
Those on the ground in Africa say Bush's 3-year-old effort is reshaping prevention efforts.
"You have community organizations, some that have operated for decades, asking for money and you have lots of new organizations popping up," said Sarah Lucas, a development assistance expert who recently toured four countries on the U.S. target list for HIV/AIDS grants.
Award recipients so far include a Christian relief organization famous for its televised appeals to feed hungry children, a well-known Roman Catholic charity and a group run by the son of evangelist Billy Graham, according to the State Department.
The outreach to nontraditional AIDS players comes in the midst of a debate over how best to prevent the spread of HIV. The debate has activated groups on both ends of the political spectrum and created a vast competition for money.
Conservative Christian allies of the president are pressing the U.S. foreign aid agency to give fewer dollars to groups that distribute condoms or work with prostitutes.
Secular organizations in Africa are raising concerns that new money to groups without AIDS experience may dilute the impact of Bush's program.
"We clearly recognize that it is very important to work with faith-based organizations," said Dan Mullins, deputy regional director for southern and western Africa for CARE, one of the best-known humanitarian organizations.
"But at the same time we don't want to fall into the trap of assuming faith-based groups are good at everything," he added.
Religious organizations last year accounted for more than 23 percent of all groups that got HIV/AIDS grants, according to State Department estimates. Some 80 percent of all secular and religious grant recipients were based in the countries where the aid is targeted.
Among those winning grants were:
_Samaritan's Purse, which is run by Graham's son, Franklin. It says its mission is "meeting critical needs of victims of war, poverty, famine, disease and natural disaster while sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ."
_World Vision. The 56-year-old Christian organization is known for its TV appeals - some with celebrities such as game show host Alex Trebek - that asked people to support a Third World child.
_Catholic Relief Services. It was awarded $6.2 million to teach abstinence and fidelity in three countries; $335 million in a consortium providing antiretroviral treatment; and $9 million to help orphans and children affected by HIV/AIDs. The group offers "complete and correct information about condoms" but will not promote, purchase or distribute them, said Carl Stecker, senior program director for HIV/AIDS.
_HOPE. The global relief organization founded by the International Churches of Christ recently brought comedian Chris Rock to South Africa for an AIDS prevention event. AIDS grants support HOPE in several countries.
_World Relief, founded by the National Association of Evangelicals. It won $9.7 million for abstinence work in four countries.
Most of the money in Bush's initiative goes to treatment programs, earning the administration praise for delivering lifesaving drugs and care to millions of HIV-infected patients.
For prevention, Bush embraces the "ABC" strategy: abstinence before marriage, being faithful to one partner and condoms targeted for high-risk activity. The Republican-led Congress mandated that one-third of prevention money be reserved for abstinence and fidelity.
The U.S. government provided more than 560 million condoms abroad last year, compared with some 350 million in 2001.
Condom promotion to anyone must include abstinence and fidelity messages, U.S. guidelines say, but those preaching abstinence do not have to provide condom education.
The abstinence emphasis, say some longtime AIDS volunteers, has led to a confusing message and added to the stigma of condom use in parts of Africa. Village volunteers in Swaziland maintain a supply of free condoms but say they have few takers.
"This drive for abstinence is putting a lot of pressure on girls to get married earlier," said Dr. Abeja Apunyo, the Uganda representative for Pathfinder International, a reproductive health nonprofit group based in Massachusetts.
"For years now we have been trying to tell our daughters that they should finish their education and train in a profession before they get married. Otherwise they have few options if they find themselves separated from their husbands for some reason," Apunyo said.
An AIDS program pastor in Uganda explained his abstinence teaching to unmarried young people.
"Why give an alternative and have them take a risk?" asked the Rev. Sam Lawrence Ruteikara of the Anglican Church of Uganda, a U.S. grant recipient. "This person doesn't have a sexual partner, so why should I report too much, saying that in case you get a sexual partner, please use a condom. I am saying, please don't get a sexual partner - don't get involved because it is risky."
U.S.-backed programs have spread abstinence and faithfulness education to more than 13 million people in Uganda, according to the State Department. Officials promote the nation as an "ABC" model, with its HIV infection rate down by more than half in a decade.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said that on a tour of Uganda in January he saw pro-abstinence rallies and skits praising Bush, and U.S.-supported groups conducting house-to-house testing, care and counseling.
"The good news about the faith-based groups is not only the passion they bring to the work, but it is the moral authority and the extended numbers of volunteers they can mobilize to get the word out," Smith said.
But Smith believes the administration is wrongly supporting some nonprofit groups. He and several other congressional conservatives wrote to Bush and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, contending that several large grant recipients were pro-prostitution, pro-abortion and not committed enough to abstinence priorities.
The letters followed a briefing last year by Focus on the Family, run by Christian commentator James Dobson. The group's sexual health analyst, Linda Klepacki, said even some religious groups emphasize condoms over abstinence.
"We have to be careful that the president's original intent is being followed where A and B (abstinence and faithfulness) are the emphasized areas of the ABC methodology," she said.
Six congressional Democrats, in a letter last week to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, accused the conservatives of a distortion campaign that undermines a balanced approach to fighting AIDS.
"Their attack is based on a narrow, ideological viewpoint that condemns condoms and frames any attempt to reach out to high-risk populations as an endorsement of behaviors that these critics oppose," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
USAID has declined to renew funding for two major AIDS-fighting consortiums, CORE and IMPACT, headed by organizations the conservatives targeted.
CORE, whose lead partner is CARE, is losing its central source of money, meaning its work survives only if it can win grants from individual USAID missions in target countries.
Family Health International, the lead organization of IMPACT, brought hundreds of local and religious groups into its $441 million project, but was told the administration wants new partners, said Sheila Mitchell, senior vice president of FHI's Institute for HIV/AIDS.
Dybul said the changes are in keeping with the shift to local groups. Any suggestion of political motivation is "inaccurate and offensive to people doing this work," he said. Millions of grant dollars still go to the groups that were criticized.
One grant was delayed when Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., complained last year about renewing $14 million to Population Services International, a leading nonprofit condom distributor.
The group's bingo-style games that teach Guatemalan prostitutes about safe sex misused funds "to exploit victims of the sex trade," Coburn said. But Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, then wrote to praise PSI's work as "provably effective and efficient."
USAID divided the grant; condom distribution was separated into the smaller part so that religious groups could apply for the other part. PSI eventually won the larger grant. The second is outstanding.
Although administration critics frequently cite PSI as a group that fell from favor under the new initiative, "we have not been eviscerated," said Stewart Parkinson, a senior program analyst.
The group lost U.S. grants in Uganda and Tanzania but retained others. And Parkinson said he had no indication of political motivation.
---
Associated Press reporters Alexandra Zavis in South Africa, Thulani Mthethwa in Swaziland, Katy Pownall in Uganda and Lewis Mwanangombe in Zambia contributed to this report.
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20060130/D8FESBAO0.html?PG=home&SEC=news
As I stated 70% of people are humanoids, no race is immune.
Currently white people rule america and even the elite of other races have to play by their rules over here...........so what of the noids???
No matter what programs they give 'black folk' here we still have the 70% rule. Plus our elites make no laws.
Us in the international community is a joke church or otherwise.
Here we are locked up in our own country 50% of the greatest prison population on earth when we only 12% of the gen pop.
Condi is coonin it up. So is the church, which is made of slave converts since probaly fewer than 10 percent of original slaves were christian.
Hell a barber shop turned into a quazi church for us, don't mean you need to worship clippers. Just a place where us black folks talk freely.
Condi makes us look like asses out here, even the UN wanted to know what's up with the prison system and black folks and the abuse by police.
Condi talking for america and black churches. Like a jew speaking for iran. Like a native american speaking for the general custurd creeme. Like a palestinian speaking for israel.
The whole world knows she is a pawn, and the black church........hahahahahah
Please, it took one generation flip slaves out their respective tribal religions.
Can't fix shit at home, our country being investigated by the UN on how they treat us and we got condi doing what...........................
She should be sucking UN cock to have them come over here and straighten out laws and schools for her own people.
Currently white people rule america and even the elite of other races have to play by their rules over here...........so what of the noids???
No matter what programs they give 'black folk' here we still have the 70% rule. Plus our elites make no laws.
Us in the international community is a joke church or otherwise.
Here we are locked up in our own country 50% of the greatest prison population on earth when we only 12% of the gen pop.
Condi is coonin it up. So is the church, which is made of slave converts since probaly fewer than 10 percent of original slaves were christian.
Hell a barber shop turned into a quazi church for us, don't mean you need to worship clippers. Just a place where us black folks talk freely.
Condi makes us look like asses out here, even the UN wanted to know what's up with the prison system and black folks and the abuse by police.
Condi talking for america and black churches. Like a jew speaking for iran. Like a native american speaking for the general custurd creeme. Like a palestinian speaking for israel.
The whole world knows she is a pawn, and the black church........hahahahahah
Please, it took one generation flip slaves out their respective tribal religions.
Can't fix shit at home, our country being investigated by the UN on how they treat us and we got condi doing what...........................
She should be sucking UN cock to have them come over here and straighten out laws and schools for her own people.
Wow...
first thing first....the separation of church and state is something that's real ONLY on paper. I think we can all agree on this one.
Second, anything sentence that mix CHRISTIANITY and BLACK PEOPLE cannot be good. I can never understand how blacks can adopt the oppressor's religion, this is beyound me. Religious leaders are usually concern only about promoting their so-called faith or whatever they call it.
Such initiative should be based on one's willingness to help others, not faith.
Remember that the church gave its <BLESSING> to the slave trade ??... And I don't need to tell you about the rest of that story.
The real motive (if all this is true), is actually the EXPANSION of CHRISTIANITY , this is just a countermeasure against ISLAM IN AFRICA. PERIOD !
first thing first....the separation of church and state is something that's real ONLY on paper. I think we can all agree on this one.
Second, anything sentence that mix CHRISTIANITY and BLACK PEOPLE cannot be good. I can never understand how blacks can adopt the oppressor's religion, this is beyound me. Religious leaders are usually concern only about promoting their so-called faith or whatever they call it.
Such initiative should be based on one's willingness to help others, not faith.
Remember that the church gave its <BLESSING> to the slave trade ??... And I don't need to tell you about the rest of that story.
The real motive (if all this is true), is actually the EXPANSION of CHRISTIANITY , this is just a countermeasure against ISLAM IN AFRICA. PERIOD !
Dolemite said:
Peace Dolemite,
You brought the noise with those comments of truth and it may hurt some knee-groes and cyber-BROTHERS aka crackas feelings. But fuck them!
<font size="5"><center>Minority church leaders backing away from GOP</font size></center>
Los Angeles Times
By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
October 24, 2006
— A major effort to draw Latinos and blacks into the Republican Party, a central element of the GOP plan to build a long-lasting majority, is in danger of collapse amid anger over the immigration debate and claims that Republican leaders have not delivered on promises to direct more money to church-based social services.
President Bush, strategist Karl Rove and other top Republicans have wooed Latino and black leaders, many of them evangelical clergy who lead large congregations, in hopes of peeling away the traditional Democratic base. But now some of the leaders who helped drive Bush to victory in 2004 are revisiting their loyalty to the Republican Party and, in some cases, abandoning it. "There is a fissure, and I doubt it will be closed in this election," said the Rev. Luis Cortes Jr., a Republican who founded the annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast that has featured Bush every year since 2002. His Philadelphia-based Esperanza USA boasts a national affiliate network of more than 10,000 churches.
The Latino backlash has grown so intense that one prominent, typically pro-Republican organization, the Latino Coalition, has endorsed Democrats in competitive races this year in Tennessee, Nebraska and New Jersey. The coalition is chaired by Hector Barreto, the former administrator of the Small Business Administration under Bush; its president is a former strategist for the Republican National Committee.
The disaffection comes as Republicans face a challenge in building enthusiasm for the upcoming election among white evangelicals and other conservatives, who have been the core of the GOP's political base.
Taken together, the unhappiness among these groups could threaten GOP hopes of minimizing losses in the Nov. 7 congressional election and may undercut the party's goal of keeping the presidency in 2008. The Latino Coalition, for example, has endorsed the presumed Democratic presidential front-runner, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), in her reelection bid this year.
Complaints among black pastors who had been courted by the White House — while less pronounced than those of Latino leaders — have been fueled by a tell-all book by former White House aide David Kuo. The new book says that Bush, referring to pastors from one major African American denomination, once griped: "Money. All these guys care about is money. They want money."
A White House spokeswoman said Friday that nobody there recalled hearing such a comment from the president.
The Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Boston Pentecostal minister and one of about two dozen black clergy invited to a series of White House meetings with Bush, said Friday that black leaders had been wooed with assurances that their social service groups would receive money from the president's faith-based initiative. But, Rivers said, the bulk of the money had gone to white organizations, leaving black churches on the sidelines.
Rivers plans to send a letter early this week to the White House demanding to know how much social services money has been directed to black churches under the faith-based initiative, and requesting a "new conversation" with Bush.
"There's a growing frustration and anger in the black religious community nationally as the Kuo book makes the rounds," Rivers said. "Meetings at the White House show you the door, but they don't necessarily open the door."
Bush won an estimated 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. While polling numbers vary, many analysts said that represented about a 9-percentage-point improvement from 2000, suggesting that Latinos might become a substantial pillar upholding a durable Republican majority.
But in recent months, Democratic activists who marveled at Bush's success in courting Latino voters watched with amazement as Republicans pushed into law a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border and tried to make it a felony to migrate illegally or to help undocumented immigrants. The latter provision did not become law, but it especially angered some church leaders, who said it would have criminalized their religious duty to help the least privileged in society.
Despite Bush's lobbying for an immigrant guest-worker program, favored by many Latinos, conservative lawmakers in the House refused to bend, forcing Bush to endorse the fence legislation and dimming his popularity among Latinos.
A survey released this month by the Latino Coalition found Latino registered voters supporting Democrats over Republicans 56% to 19% in congressional elections. "If Republicans nationally get 25% of the Hispanic vote, it would be a miracle," said Robert de Posada, the coalition president.
That disaffection is felt among some of the Latino clergy who were courted by the White House.
The Rev. Danny de Leon of Templo Calvario in Santa Ana, considered the biggest Latino bilingual church in the U.S., said he was so frustrated with his party's response to immigration that he was likely to stay home next month rather than vote for Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — and that he might also sit out the 2008 election.
"A lot of people are saying, 'Forget being a Republican. I want to go to the Democratic Party,' " said De Leon. "It's a shame that one issue has divided many of us that have been in the Republican Party for a long time and has brought us to ask the question: Do I or do I not want to belong to this party?"
Pastor Luciano Padilla Jr. of the Bay Ridge Christian Center in Brooklyn said he had backed Republicans because of their views on such issues as gay marriage and abortion. But in the midst of the immigration debate, he said, "We will have to look at where we put our allegiance in the future."
Cortes, of Esperanza USA, says he continues to respect Bush but now has doubts about the GOP. "That group in the Republican Party said, 'We want your parents, your grandparents, we want anyone here without documentation, regardless of why — we want them out,' " he said. "If voting is about personal interest, how are Hispanics to vote? They will vote against those guys."
The White House now faces a symbolic choice on the border-fence legislation: Does Bush rally the GOP base with a large, pre-election signing ceremony, or does he reject such fanfare in hopes of avoiding long-term damage among Latinos?
Republican officials said their internal polls showed the party winning about 32% of the Latino voting bloc this year — similar to the 2002 results that helped the GOP gain seats in Congress.
They said the party would continue its aggressive outreach, focusing on issues such as home ownership, jobs and family values.
"We cannot maintain majority status in America without a growing share of the Latino vote," said Adrian Gray, director of strategy at the Republican National Committee. He said that "when 44% of Latinos supported President Bush in that last election, it opens the door for many of them to vote Republican in the future."
Causing new wrinkles in the White House relationship with evangelicals is the Kuo book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," in which he describes top White House aides embracing religious conservatives in public while calling them "nuts" behind their backs.
One leading black evangelical who has been an occasional White House guest, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the Hope Christian Church in Maryland, wrote of a similar incident this month.
Jackson railed against senior administration officials who, he said, had insulted clergy at a meeting this year by dismissing their contribution to Bush's reelection in 2004. He also complained about "the GOP's failure" to react speedily to the House page scandal involving Mark Foley, the Republican congressman from Florida who resigned recently.
Jackson still supports some Republicans, including Michael Steele, an African American candidate for Senate in Maryland. But in an essay on the website townhall.com, Jackson offered a caution for the party: "Evangelicals must ask themselves if we can work in harmony with a group that takes us for granted and compromises on major moral principles."
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...4oct24,0,2344683.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Los Angeles Times
By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer
October 24, 2006
— A major effort to draw Latinos and blacks into the Republican Party, a central element of the GOP plan to build a long-lasting majority, is in danger of collapse amid anger over the immigration debate and claims that Republican leaders have not delivered on promises to direct more money to church-based social services.
President Bush, strategist Karl Rove and other top Republicans have wooed Latino and black leaders, many of them evangelical clergy who lead large congregations, in hopes of peeling away the traditional Democratic base. But now some of the leaders who helped drive Bush to victory in 2004 are revisiting their loyalty to the Republican Party and, in some cases, abandoning it. "There is a fissure, and I doubt it will be closed in this election," said the Rev. Luis Cortes Jr., a Republican who founded the annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast that has featured Bush every year since 2002. His Philadelphia-based Esperanza USA boasts a national affiliate network of more than 10,000 churches.
The Latino backlash has grown so intense that one prominent, typically pro-Republican organization, the Latino Coalition, has endorsed Democrats in competitive races this year in Tennessee, Nebraska and New Jersey. The coalition is chaired by Hector Barreto, the former administrator of the Small Business Administration under Bush; its president is a former strategist for the Republican National Committee.
The disaffection comes as Republicans face a challenge in building enthusiasm for the upcoming election among white evangelicals and other conservatives, who have been the core of the GOP's political base.
Taken together, the unhappiness among these groups could threaten GOP hopes of minimizing losses in the Nov. 7 congressional election and may undercut the party's goal of keeping the presidency in 2008. The Latino Coalition, for example, has endorsed the presumed Democratic presidential front-runner, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), in her reelection bid this year.
Complaints among black pastors who had been courted by the White House — while less pronounced than those of Latino leaders — have been fueled by a tell-all book by former White House aide David Kuo. The new book says that Bush, referring to pastors from one major African American denomination, once griped: "Money. All these guys care about is money. They want money."
A White House spokeswoman said Friday that nobody there recalled hearing such a comment from the president.
The Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Boston Pentecostal minister and one of about two dozen black clergy invited to a series of White House meetings with Bush, said Friday that black leaders had been wooed with assurances that their social service groups would receive money from the president's faith-based initiative. But, Rivers said, the bulk of the money had gone to white organizations, leaving black churches on the sidelines.
Rivers plans to send a letter early this week to the White House demanding to know how much social services money has been directed to black churches under the faith-based initiative, and requesting a "new conversation" with Bush.
"There's a growing frustration and anger in the black religious community nationally as the Kuo book makes the rounds," Rivers said. "Meetings at the White House show you the door, but they don't necessarily open the door."
Bush won an estimated 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. While polling numbers vary, many analysts said that represented about a 9-percentage-point improvement from 2000, suggesting that Latinos might become a substantial pillar upholding a durable Republican majority.
But in recent months, Democratic activists who marveled at Bush's success in courting Latino voters watched with amazement as Republicans pushed into law a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border and tried to make it a felony to migrate illegally or to help undocumented immigrants. The latter provision did not become law, but it especially angered some church leaders, who said it would have criminalized their religious duty to help the least privileged in society.
Despite Bush's lobbying for an immigrant guest-worker program, favored by many Latinos, conservative lawmakers in the House refused to bend, forcing Bush to endorse the fence legislation and dimming his popularity among Latinos.
A survey released this month by the Latino Coalition found Latino registered voters supporting Democrats over Republicans 56% to 19% in congressional elections. "If Republicans nationally get 25% of the Hispanic vote, it would be a miracle," said Robert de Posada, the coalition president.
That disaffection is felt among some of the Latino clergy who were courted by the White House.
The Rev. Danny de Leon of Templo Calvario in Santa Ana, considered the biggest Latino bilingual church in the U.S., said he was so frustrated with his party's response to immigration that he was likely to stay home next month rather than vote for Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — and that he might also sit out the 2008 election.
"A lot of people are saying, 'Forget being a Republican. I want to go to the Democratic Party,' " said De Leon. "It's a shame that one issue has divided many of us that have been in the Republican Party for a long time and has brought us to ask the question: Do I or do I not want to belong to this party?"
Pastor Luciano Padilla Jr. of the Bay Ridge Christian Center in Brooklyn said he had backed Republicans because of their views on such issues as gay marriage and abortion. But in the midst of the immigration debate, he said, "We will have to look at where we put our allegiance in the future."
Cortes, of Esperanza USA, says he continues to respect Bush but now has doubts about the GOP. "That group in the Republican Party said, 'We want your parents, your grandparents, we want anyone here without documentation, regardless of why — we want them out,' " he said. "If voting is about personal interest, how are Hispanics to vote? They will vote against those guys."
The White House now faces a symbolic choice on the border-fence legislation: Does Bush rally the GOP base with a large, pre-election signing ceremony, or does he reject such fanfare in hopes of avoiding long-term damage among Latinos?
Republican officials said their internal polls showed the party winning about 32% of the Latino voting bloc this year — similar to the 2002 results that helped the GOP gain seats in Congress.
They said the party would continue its aggressive outreach, focusing on issues such as home ownership, jobs and family values.
"We cannot maintain majority status in America without a growing share of the Latino vote," said Adrian Gray, director of strategy at the Republican National Committee. He said that "when 44% of Latinos supported President Bush in that last election, it opens the door for many of them to vote Republican in the future."
Causing new wrinkles in the White House relationship with evangelicals is the Kuo book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," in which he describes top White House aides embracing religious conservatives in public while calling them "nuts" behind their backs.
One leading black evangelical who has been an occasional White House guest, Bishop Harry Jackson Jr. of the Hope Christian Church in Maryland, wrote of a similar incident this month.
Jackson railed against senior administration officials who, he said, had insulted clergy at a meeting this year by dismissing their contribution to Bush's reelection in 2004. He also complained about "the GOP's failure" to react speedily to the House page scandal involving Mark Foley, the Republican congressman from Florida who resigned recently.
Jackson still supports some Republicans, including Michael Steele, an African American candidate for Senate in Maryland. But in an essay on the website townhall.com, Jackson offered a caution for the party: "Evangelicals must ask themselves if we can work in harmony with a group that takes us for granted and compromises on major moral principles."
peter.wallsten@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...4oct24,0,2344683.story?coll=la-home-headlines
<center><font size=4 color=blue>!Listening involves hard work .. Using hearing, sensing, interpretation, evaluation and response!</font></center>
<center>
<font size=4 color=blue>!! .... When I become a legislator .... !!
</font>
<font size=4 color=blue>!! .... Caveat Emptor .... !!
</font>
<img src="http://www.siu.edu/~bas/Images/bpfist.gif">
!There is nothing new under the sun!
Biblically! The so-called American Blacks are descendants of Abraham, namely Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons and their wives, 70 in all, migrated from Canaan to Egypt around the year 1827 B.C. During their sojourn in Egypt the Children of Israel multiplied from being a family of 70 souls to a nation of over 3 million people at the time of the Exodus which took place in 1612 B.C.
This truth is grossly neglected, suppressed, and distorted in most European and American historical texts which are flavored with race prejudice. Fortunately, however, there are enough well authored and highly researched works by Black historians that challenge the Eurocentric revisions of history and correct the various erroneous views regarding the ethnic identity of the Hebrews.
</center>
<center>
<font size=4 color=blue>!! .... When I become a legislator .... !!
</font>
<font size=4 color=blue>!! .... Caveat Emptor .... !!
</font>
<img src="http://www.siu.edu/~bas/Images/bpfist.gif">
!There is nothing new under the sun!
Biblically! The so-called American Blacks are descendants of Abraham, namely Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons and their wives, 70 in all, migrated from Canaan to Egypt around the year 1827 B.C. During their sojourn in Egypt the Children of Israel multiplied from being a family of 70 souls to a nation of over 3 million people at the time of the Exodus which took place in 1612 B.C.
This truth is grossly neglected, suppressed, and distorted in most European and American historical texts which are flavored with race prejudice. Fortunately, however, there are enough well authored and highly researched works by Black historians that challenge the Eurocentric revisions of history and correct the various erroneous views regarding the ethnic identity of the Hebrews.
</center>
Greed said:
I was just waiting on your Condi/TDJakes progress report. My bad, the suspense got the best of me. I know you have plenty of good news to drop for us.
Maybe you can clear up alot of the problems the current administration has been having. I'm sure they're just misunderstood right?
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