Below is an email I received that I thought was telling. My add to it would be: if women can complain about a glass ceiling in the workplace, then Christians should start complaining about a cosmic ceiling in the mainstream. That is, religion should not be banned from public discourse … especially if its ways work better than secular ways in being able to solve personal and societal problems. And that is the case, which is why people who live by the Bible are frustrated to see problems continue that they know don’t have to continue, given the track record of the Bible’s effectiveness in fixing personal lives, as well as entire cultures (which I cite examples in my book The Plague Of Liberalism of when that has happened).

Catholic League president Bill Donohue urged Catholics to reject Sen. Barack Obama’s faith-based initiative: “If a customer walked into a New York deli and said, ‘Let me have a hot dog on a roll—hold the frankfurter’—he’d likely be thrown out. That’s what the public should do to Obama’s faith-based initiative: since he wants to gut the faith from his faith-based programs, he should be told to junk it.

“Any church or religious agency that agrees to take federal money on the condition that it must operate in a secular fashion—in hiring and in disseminating its values—is selling out. If Orthodox Jews running a day care center are not allowed to exclusively hire Orthodox Jews, there is nothing kosher about it. If a Catholic foster care program cannot place Catholic children with Catholic parents, it is doing a disservice to the children. If an evangelical drug rehab program can’t deliver a Christian message to its clients, it may as well close up shop. But that’s what Obama wants—he wants to secularize the religious workplace.

“No wonder Obama said yesterday that ‘I’m not saying that faith-based groups are an alternative to government or secular nonprofits, and I’m not saying that they’re somehow better at lifting people up.’ Indeed, if he really believes this then he might     as well withdraw his initiative.

“The whole purpose behind funding faith-based programs is that they are, in fact, superior to secular programs. And the reason they are has everything to do with the inculcation of religious values disseminated by people of faith. No matter, Obama wants to gut the religious values and bar religious agencies from hiring people who share their religion. Hence, his initiative is a fraud.”