Jimmy Carter on Faith-Based Funding
Baptist and former President Jimmy Carter has come under fire recently for comments made about the legacy of President Bush. Somehow in that dust-up I missed his remarks about faith-based funding in the same interview. According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:
[T]he Baptist Sunday School teacher saved some of his harshest criticism for Bush’s “faith-based” agenda.Citing an article in The New York Times, Carter said hundreds of millions of dollars in federal earmarks are now going to fund religious institutions.
“Individual churches and religious seminaries and other strictly religious organizations have their own lobbyists now in Washington to make sure they get their share of taxpayers’ funds. And, as you know, the policy from the White House has been to allocate funds to religious institutions, even those that channel those funds exclusively to their own particular group of believers in a particular religion. Those things in my opinion are quite disturbing,” Carter said.
“As a traditional Baptist, I’ve always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one.”