Faith-Based Response

Senator Rick Santorum, among others, has suggested that the poor government response to Hurricane Katrina should be reason enough to direct more funding to faith-based groups. This is a bad idea, as well as an illogical response to the failure of the federal government in particular. First of all, the experience of the past 5 years with the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has shown itself to be involved in establishing a religion, Christianity, above other religions. By far most of the money has gone to Christian organizations and very little has gone to any other religion. The idea of the government paying churches money to do the government's work is ridiculous. It is also not the best solution to the failures in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The weaknesses exposed were largely due to cronyism in the upper eschelon of the Bush Administration and FEMA and the chronic under-funding of FEMA and other disaster-preparedness initiatives. Thus, diverting more money from the government's disaster relief agencies to church groups, who are not likely to have an over-arching coordination of relief efforts, and cannot fulfill all of the roles that the government and expecting this to improve the response to future disasters is a completely illogical conclusion.