Priorities, People

No one denies that discrimination on the basis of religion is a bad thing. After all, freedom of religion ranks right up there with freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights. However, when only a certain segment of American religions receives the attention of a federal agency to the exclusion of other segments, especially when that attention is diverted away from other forms of discrimination, the bias itself violates the Constitution. An article in today's NY Times shows how that shift in focus is manifested in the Department of Justice.

In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations that the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict. ...

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

¶Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

¶Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.

Candy canes as a symbol of Jesus and the blood shed on the cross? Oh, please. Even if that were so, forcing school districts to allow such a religious message to be sent home with children seems to ignore the fact that the idea of freedom of religion also includes freedom from religion. The DOJ seems to be oblivious to the fact that this nation's founders were people who wanted to avoid just such governmental intrusion.

This administration has managed to weaken our military by overuse to the point that the armed forces have been described as "broken." I think the Department of Justice has also been broken, albeit in a different fashion.