In an interview with David Brody at Christian Broadcasting Networking, Lieberman says, McCain is a serious Christian believer. This runs slightly contrary to what former Republican Senator Rick Santorum said but who am I to say which McCain supporter has a more accurate view (and whether it even matters).
Lieberman went on to criticize Obama’s position on the faith based initiative. “I’m glad to see some other Democrat talk about faith based initiatives,” Lieberman said. This struck me as a bit disingenuous since both Bill Clinton and Al Gore supported the idea. I guess now that he’s no longer a Democrat, Lieberman has swung from showing how.
The second slippery thing he said was that Obama wants to make it so that faith-based organizations couldn’t limit hiring to people of their own faith — i.e. a Baptist Church could be forced to hire non-Baptists. That’s not true. Under Obama’s plan, a Baptist Church could limit its hiring to Baptists as much as they want — except for programs that are getting federal money. So if the church has addiction counselling and a soup kitchen, and it gets government money for the soup kitchen but not the counseling area, then it it could hire only Baptists in the counseling area but couldn’t “dicrimiante” in the soup kitchen. In other words, when you get government money, you have to live by government rules.
On the other hand, there’s a lot about the Obama plan that’s still awfully vague. It’s unclear to me whether he’s advocating going back to the pre-Bush rules, or the pre-Clinton rules (which were even more strict). So far the Obama campaign has not responded to my questions about this.