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President Obama Can Help Stop Religious Discrimination
Barry Lynn, the longtime executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, recently posted an important essay at Huffington Post. In it, he cheered the Obama administration's recognition of the recent anti-LGBTQ legislative bigotry in Indiana. But Lynn's main purpose was to highlight the practice, which has existed since the Bush administration, of allowing federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of religion. The practice, he says, is justified by a flawed 2007 analysis from the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department under president George W. Bush. Lynn's organization and some seven dozen organizations have asked the president to rescind the Bush era memo as a basis for policy.
The letter's other signatories include the American Association of University Women, the ACLU, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFL-CIO), the American Jewish Committee, Hindu American Foundation, Human Rights Campaign, Muslim Advocates, Interfaith Alliance, the Council for Secular Humanism, Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP in and many more civil liberties watchdogs, women's rights groups and progressive religious organizations. |
Lynn wrote:
President Bush also amended a long-standing executive order banning federal discrimination in hiring under government contracts, a provision originally created in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Bush altered it to create a broad "religious exemption" so that religious group could take public funds yet still restrict hiring to members of their own faith or people who subscribe to specific theological views.
Where has the current administration gone with all this? Painfully, not very far. In the summer of 2014, President Obama did re-write the executive order on discrimination to specifically prohibit any discriminatory treatment of LGBT persons by grant and contract recipients. This was a big and important step forward, but it didn't solve the problem of allowing discriminatory selection based on the desire to hire co-religionists only or to use theological standards to be a justification for hiring on the basis of religious views about gender roles or even race. It seems that the administration acknowledged that at least one form of discrimination was wrong -- but continued to allow other forms.
President Obama has also failed to fix the hiring discrimination problem in other areas. In the summer of 2007, the Bush Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice issued a document that specifically justified any religiously-motivated discrimination under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), even in regard to statutes like Head Start, AmeriCorps and the Workforce Investment Act that contained specifically statutory prohibitions on such discriminatory conduct. This memo erroneously alleged that RFRA could be "reasonably construed" to create a categorical religious exemption in all federal programs. This is not "reasonable"; this was never what the federal RFRA was about. As one of the people who crafted that bill, I can assure you it would have been unthinkable, much less articulated, that this modest law would have this sweeping implication.
About 90 national organizations have pleaded, with the Administration to review and repeal this OLC memo. No decision has been made to date.
Thee are many other problems with the Faith-Based Initiative that merit attention and might also begin to be solved if the president would follow Lynn's advice. And its not as if he doesn't know. As a presidential candidate, Obama promised to clean up the faith-based program and hold federal grantees accountable. "If you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them," Obama said during a July 2008 campaign speech. But a 2014 investigation by Andy Kopsa in The Nation magazine found that "little has changed."
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