More on faith-based programs and "discrimination"

Here is an essay, by Keith Pavlischek, which sets out well (I think) the concerns that one might have -- concerns that, contra E.J. Dionne, do not make one a culture-warrior or narrow ideologue -- about Sen. Obama's proposed changes to the faith-based-initiative.  A taste:

. . .  The hiring issue became a problem only when the cultural warriors of the Left saw Bush's faith-based initiative as a threat to their political strength and sought to deny Bush a political victory. Even John DiIulio, Bush's first head of the Faith-Based initiative gets this wrong. As Joseph Knippenberg shows in a review of DiIulio's Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America's Faith-Based Future, he mistakenly states that the Charitable Choice legislation signed by President Clinton and the Civil Right Act does not contain such a robust hiring protection.

Regardless, it is still hard to see the objection to maintaining these protections. It is a matter of simple justice. If a nonprofit center provided counseling to drug addicts based on some secular (say, Freudian) theory of counseling, they should not be required to hire, as a condition of government funding, Christian counselors (or anti-Freudian secularists for that matter) who take a different approach. And vice versa. Gay-friendly counseling centers should not be required, as a condition of funding, to hire fundamentalists or Roman Catholics who have profound moral objections to homosexual activity. And vice versa. . . .