. By regulation, the Bush administration has removed requirements for professional qualifications for employees who act as therapists and counselors.
Restrictions against discrimination in hiring have been removed. Jews, Muslims and gay persons are victims of harsh hiring discrimination. Many faith-based grant recipients are openly using religious conversion as a tool of therapy.
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Some credit should be given to the editor of Consortium News for bringing this smart and incisive essay to our attention. It exposes the soft under-belly of the monstrosity that goes by many names such as, Moral Majority, Christian Right, Compassionate Conservatism, and Neocon. The back of this monstrosity is the Bush Doctrine. Conservatives used political power to increase the "Creationist" church, and used that church to increase their political power. Their failure to govern effectively led to their collapse. Now is the time to reverse the tide and bring the church back to its proper function in a democracy.
Rev. Bess points out something which has been ignored for years, that the church in America found the legal way to do good things with federal money which do not erode the wall between Church and State long ago, and get no credit for it. Playing by the rules has been demoted since the Reagan years and gleeful vandalism has been promoted by some so-called "evangelical" churches. It's time for those churches to grow up and take responsibilty for the damage they do in using illegal methods to increased their membership.