Bush is Said to Scale Back His Religion-Based Initiatives.
President Bush set aside his large scale plans to give federal money to religious charities and will instead support a diluted version of his religion based initiative. Because of the pressures of both the war on terrorism and the national outburst of donations to charities since September 11, the White house was swayed to abandon the most controversial part of the measure to win the passage of a law that would allow the government to fund charities. .
The president is planning to move ahead with the full bill later next summer, but the religion based bill could just end up another victim of the reversal of the presidents priorities since the acts of terrorism against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The House passed a religion-based bill over the summer. Democrats were very skeptical of the charitable choice provisions that would allow religious groups to receive federal funding and to disregard antidiscrimination laws so that they could hire only members of their faith. The main concern was that the religious groups would use the federal money to spread their faith.
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The legislation was delayed in the senate where majority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said he was unlikely to contemplate the bill so soon because of the charitable choice provisions. White house officials are now saying that they were working with the Senate to create a bill with a broad base of support that could be passed later this year. They hope to add some provisions of charitable choice such as the aid to children of prisoners. The president's willingness to drop some of these provisions allows Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, and Joseph Lieberman, of Connecticut, to put these plans through legislation sometime in the next two weeks.
About two weeks ago the White House and these two Senators started discussions to pass the religious charity bill that would largely give attention to changing the tax code to promote more donations and to establish a sympathy fund for religious charities.
