You can. Georgia Tech's intro to CS classes for non-engineers are both Python (the engineering one is Matlab). Objects are introduced at the end, but as a concept OO is largely deferred to the following class, in Java. GT actually used to have the intro class be in Scheme, but switched it to Python a number of years ago, which they've stayed with. I agree though, Scheme would be a good language, but the impedance mismatch to get to more popular languages would be higher (plus have students asking "who uses this?!" Being able to reply "Google" tends to satisfy that question pretty well)

When I was there, at least, the focus was on basic programming concepts, functions, variables, loops, recursion, conditionals, and library interaction was largely imperative, more focused on successful execution than on the organization of the code.