Accountability is problematic when there is not clarity of expectations or agreed-upon goals, and that lack of clarity has long been a characteristic of social welfare in the United States.
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Redemption and Rehabilitation: Charitable Choice and Criminal Justice
Unlike social services like job training and placement, day care or medical assistance, such drug and prison programs are not merely faith-based, they are faith-infused. It is not accidental that so many prison programs are called “Ministries.”
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Are They Really Blue?
As many of you know, when I left the Republican Party and became a Democrat, Stonewall Democrats had a "coming out" party for me. They considered coming out an appropriate term, because both Democrats and Republicans accused me of being a closet Democrat all along. But that was really not the case. The truth is, I did not leave the Republican Party. It left me.
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Perversions
One of the more memorable moments at the recent Indiana Senate hearing on the Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage was provided by an African-American pastor. Testifying on behalf of the ban, he objected to any comparison with the miscegenation laws that formerly forbid interracial marriages, thundering "Don’t compare my God-given black skin with human learned perversions."
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Who Pays the Piper?
In Merrie Olde England, so the story goes, there were pipers–lute players–who lived by their music. They would go to fairs or similar venues and perform, secure in the knowledge that they would be paid by one of the many who had enjoyed the pleasure of the dance. This is thought to be the origin of "to pay the piper," an adage that reminds us that if no one had come forward to pay the piper, the music would have stopped. This elementary rule of the market seems to have escaped the members of Indiana’s General Assembly.
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