While criticizing the Muslim world for establishing a series of "medrassas", schools where the teaching of Islam supercedes other disciplines, the Bush administrations "faith-based initiative" programs impose on inmates, job seekers and students training programs that force participants to acknowledge and participate in evangelical Christian prosthelitizing.
[T]he only way an inmate could qualify for [a] kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program — which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time — says on its Web site that it seeks “to ‘cure’ prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems” and showing inmates “how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.”

The Iowa prison program is not unique. Since 2000, courts have cited more than a dozen programs for having unconstitutionally used taxpayer money to pay for religious activities or evangelism aimed at prisoners, recovering addicts, job seekers, teenagers and children.

Nevertheless, the programs are proliferating. For example, the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison management company, with 65 facilities and 71,000 inmates under its control, is substantially expanding its religion-based curriculum and now has 22 institutions offering residential programs similar to the one in Iowa. And the federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs at least five multifaith programs at its facilities, is preparing to seek bids for a single-faith prison program as well.
Source: "Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid For by Taxes" - DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ANDREW LEHREN - NY Times - December 10, 2006





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There you go again, expecting reasonable, logical, and thoughtful people to be running the world around us. Linda
Denton
3/23/2011

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