President Joe Biden – the supposedly devout Catholic – has targeted religious groups, including those who share his own faith, by undoing legal provisions that protected Christian groups from funding abortion through health insurance plans, and by ridiculing and dismissing religious objections to COVID-19 vaccines.
Well, the faithful are set to take another hit from this allegedly pious president.
As he headed to the exit, former President Donald Trump strengthened religious protections for federal contractors.
Trump’s Labor Department issued a rule that granted shielded contractors – described by the department as religious corporations, associations, educational institutions, and societies – from anti-discrimination allegations and punishment if they asserted that certain hiring practices were done in accordance with, or to further, their religious faith.
The exemption was based on similar language in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The rule itself said it was intended to reinforce the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, whose purpose is to prevent the federal government from “substantially burdening” someone’s free exercise of religion.
“Religious organizations should not have to fear that acceptance of a federal contract or subcontract will require them to abandon their religious character or identity,” Trump’s Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia said at the time it was implemented.
But last week, the Biden administration moved to repeal the rule.
Jenny Yang, a Labor Department official, wrote that the “proposed rescission would protect against discrimination and safeguard principles of religious freedom.
“With this proposal,” she said, the department “would simply return to our policy and practice of considering the facts of each case and applying Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] principles and case law and other applicable law.”
The administration also said it wanted to ensure that “taxpayer funds are not used to discriminate, especially in the performance of functions for the government itself and, thus, for the public.”
Biden’s action raises the question of how rescinding the rule still keeps the same protections in place for religious organizations.
Yet as American Spectator columnist George Neumayr writes, it can’t.
In short, based on the new rule’s language, “Organizations that object to Biden’s LGBTQ agenda and support for abortion rights won’t get federal contracts,” he wrote recently.
Neumayr noted that Yang had complained that Trump’s provision was overly broad and “departed” the “approach” of basing eligibility for the religious exemption on “whether the employer’s purpose and character are primarily religious.”
As Neumayr wrote, “The Trump administration correctly recognized that religious freedom belongs not just to explicitly sectarian organizations but to all Americans. The ‘approach’ to which Yang refers is an unconstitutional attempt to narrow the right of religious freedom under the First Amendment.”
Biden is doing something similar with vaccines, by claiming that faithful Americans could not possibly hold religious objections to jabs because their faith leaders have blessed the shots.
“Where Trump sought to expand religious exemptions according to an originalist understanding of the First Amendment,” Neumayr added, “Biden seeks to eliminate them. He wants to force anyone who interacts with the federal government to accept his wokeness at the expense of their religious freedom.”
Continuing, Neumayr added, “Biden is using edicts to impose on the states and the people a kind of national religion of wokeness. Under it, the traditionally religious are treated as bad citizens, too disreputable to receive federal contracts or serve in the military.”
“No doubt this hubris is contributing to Biden’s unpopularity,” he concluded.
“In the name of eliminating discrimination, he is only creating new and worse forms of it, aimed at the very God-fearing Americans for whom the Constitution was written. Biden seeks to drive them out of the public square at the exact moment their presence in it is most needed to restore the country to health.”
Check out Tampafp.com for Politics, Tampa Local News, Sports, and National Headlines. Support journalism by clicking here to our GoFundMe or sign up for our free newsletter by clicking here. Android Users, Click Here To Download The Free Press App And Never Miss A Story. It’s Free And Coming To Apple Users Soon.