Yesterday, an "orgy of strange bedfellows," as former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson put it, got together to release a package of policy proposals to combat poverty, under the auspices of a new "common ground" coalition, The Poverty Forum. The group was convened by Gerson and Sojourners president Jim Wallis, the ubiquitous but accommodationist crusader against poverty. Although Wallis claimed the proposals transcended labels of left and right or conservative and liberal, the intent was clear: Liberals and conservatives both have good ideas and can find "common ground" to press for policy changes everyone can agree on. Except that both the "everyone" and "common ground" are limited: Wallis somewhat condescendingly dismissed the notion that the group might be aiming for something sweeping, like universal health care, and settled on small bore proposals that he maintains no one would find controversial. (As Mark Silk points out, it's not even clear that all the participants, Gerson included, endorse even the small bore proposals like a modest increase in the minimum wage.) The avoidance of the dreaded divisiveness is Wallis' higher purpose, or so he thinks. He says that defining a fetus as a person under the federal children's health insurance program (SCHIP) is only intended to improve access to health care for pregnant women. Anyone with objections about the "slippery slope" to criminalizing abortion is just being petty and divisive. "We have to get past the fear of slippery slopes and what this language might mean for the legal argument, we must get to what really supports womens' health and children," said Wallis. All right, then. How about finding another way to provide health insurance? The "orgy," as it were (oh, if only the project were that thrilling!) was really an orgy of wiping conservatives' slate clean of their policy sins. Sure, Gerson was just the speechwriter and not the policymaker, but his purpose in the Bush White House was to cloak legislation that was crushing the poor in the rhetoric of compassion and patriotism. A verbal orgy, if you will. Among other participants in this "common ground" project were Chuck Donovan of the Family Research Council, which just today is emailing supporters warning that "President Barack Obama has unveiled his massive plan to silence the moral voices of America and reshape our country. He calls it 'The Agenda.'" They're worried about an imaginary orgy of another kind. It's really the FRC view of the world -- with the "traditional family" at its center, everyone else be damned -- that animates this project. One participant, Brent Orrell, who served in various capacities in Bush's faith-based initiatives, remarked that the package of proposals "when taken as a whole, embodies the best and most timeless conservative ideas and principles [including] focusing on the traditional family as seedbed of virtue and education and economic participation." If, as politicians have clearly decided, if not out of sincerity then out of political expediency, that they need to listen to "people of faith," they need to listen to a variety of voices, not just the (admittedly Christian-only) "common ground" of the Poverty Forum. As Peter Laarman puts it, "poor people DO have enemies, and among their worst enemies are conservative religious figures who cannot wean themselves from Reaganite free-market ideology, who cannot distinguish change from charity, and who still think that making poor women bear children for calamity (cf. Isaiah 65:23) somehow conduces to God’s greater glory. To kowtow to these enemies of the poor merely grants them yet more undeserved power and legitimacy." --Sarah Posner
