Faith-Based and Blind

From Digby, David Kuo tells this story:

All this information trickled in to our office when we requested updates on the Compassion Capital Fund. It took a while, but we finally got the list of recommended grantees. It was obvious that the ratings were a farce.

[A few years later,] my wife Kim and I were together with a group of friends and acquaintances. Someone mentioned that I used to work at the White House in the faith-based office. A woman piped up and said, "Really? Wow, I was on the peer-review panel for the first Compassion Capital Fund." I asked her about how she liked it and she said it was fun. She talked about how the government employees gave them grant review instructions – look at everything objectively against a discreet list of requirements and score accordingly. "But," she said with a giggle, "when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero."

At first I laughed. A funny joke. Not so much. She was proud and giggling and didn't get that there was a problem with that. I asked if she knew of others who'd done the same. "Oh sure, a lot of us did." She must have seen my surprise, "Was there a problem with that?"

I told her there was actually a huge problem with that. The programs were to be faith-neutral. Our goal was equal treatment for faith-based groups, not special treatment for them. This was a smart and accomplished Christian woman. She got it immediately. But what she did comported with her understanding of what the faith-initiative was supposed to do – help Christian groups – and with her faith. She wanted people to know Jesus.

Kuo's putting a very charitable face on it. The reality is, these right-wing Christianists just don't get it. It doesn't penetrate that under the Constitution of the United States, which these great patriots obviously think was written in Martian or something, "non-Christian" and "Christian" are equal before the law. Not part of their worldview. Not possible in their reality. And it never occurs to them that a stunt like this woman pulled is fundamentally dishonest and immoral -- non-Christian groups can't be religious, because only their particular sect of Christianity is a real religion.

And Digby's not giving this cheating bitch the benefit of the doubt:

And I hate to be nasty about this, but this woman he describes is not actually an innocent. She giggled about how clever she was for automatically giving the non-[]Christian groups a zero because she was among people whom she obviously assumed would approve of such behavior. When she saw that she was dealing with someone of integrity she backed off and pretended not to have realized that she was not being a good Christian or a responsible adult. It was not a simple misunderstanding.

Digby calls it: not a responsible adult, and not a good Christian. Look, I've actually been in discussions with nutcases who don't consider the Pope a Christian. These guys have a hammerlock on Truth. Reality doesn't have any bearing.

They are fundamentally amoral. And fundmentally anti-American.