‘Santa’ Trump’s Parting Gift To His Christian Fan Base Is A Real Doozy

IN THE run-up to a festive season shaping up to be like no other, the Trump administration, according to Slate, this week gave the green light to federal contractors to discriminate against racial and religious minorities, women, and especially LGBTQ people in the name of protecting ‘religious liberty.’

It effectively abolishes critical workplace protections for these contractors that have been in place for decades, reframing religious freedom as a near-limitless license to discriminate. Monday’s move will force the Biden administration to waste countless hours and resources reversing this radical rewrite of federal law.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State is appalled. Its President and CEO Rachel Laser said in a statement:

It’s unconscionable, though hardly surprising, that the lame-duck Trump administration would expand the ability of federal contractors – who employ one-fifth of the American workforce – to use religious litmus tests to hire or fire employees for jobs paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s especially heartless that the Trump administration would advance this policy in the midst of a global public health and economic crisis.The constitutional right to religious freedom promises everyone the right to live their lives secure that the government will treat them equally, no matter what their belief system.

The new Department of Labor rule, however, turns this core American value on its head and puts countless peoples’ jobs at risk because they do not share the religious views or meet the religious code of conduct of a government contractor. Like so many others issued by the Trump administration, this rule particularly puts at risk workers who are LGBTQ, women, religious minorities and non-religious people.

Laser, above, added:

On Nov. 4, the voters rejected this type of religion-based discrimination that has been supported by the Trump administration and the President’s Christian nationalist allies. This rule is a last-gasp effort by the outgoing administration to ignore the will of the people and cement a legacy of using religious freedom as a sword to harm people, rather than a shield to protect all of us.

We urge the Biden-Harris administration to restore and protect religious freedom and right the wrongs of the Trump administration, including by directing the Department of Labor to immediately begin the process of revoking this rule.

Americans United has prepared an “Agenda to Restore & Protect Religious Freedom” for the Biden-Harris administration, which includes protecting federally funded employees from religious discrimination. An overview of that agenda is available here.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern revealed that a key figure in the move to overturn rules restricting discrimination that spring from Executive Order 11246 – which President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965 – is a real sweetheart named Eugene Scalia above, the current Labor Secretary.

Eugene Scalia is no fan of these rules – or, it seems, of any workplace protections. Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, previously worked as a corporate attorney who specialized in crushing employees’ rights. He has spent his tenure at the Labor Department dismantling federal regulations that safeguard workers’ rights, health, and safety.

Scalia’s deregulatory agenda has been especially catastrophic during the pandemic; under his guidance, the agency refused to protect workers from COVID-19, permitting fatal outbreaks through its own shocking negligence.

In the long run, Scalia may be best remembered for abandoning his duty to shield vulnerable employees from infection and death – the many people who died of COVID-19 after he declined to enforce basic workplace safety rules in the midst of a pandemic are gone forever.

Scalia’s new discrimination rule, by contrast, will have a short shelf life: There is no doubt that the Biden administration will repeal it, though the process may take months, even years.

Stern wrote that Scalia framed his rule as a mere “interpretation” of current law, seizing upon a previous exemption added by President George W Bush. The past modification allowed a subset of religious contractors to favor employees of a “particular religion.”

Bush’s exemption was designed to let faith groups hire co-religionists; for instance, it would let a Jewish charity hire a Jewish director, even though turning away non-Jewish applicants would otherwise constitute illegal discrimination. The courts have interpreted this provision to cover nonprofit organizations and institutions with a dedicated religious mission.

But under Scalia’s rule:

This narrow exemption will become a black hole that sucks up all claims of discrimination. It manufactures a new test by plucking language out of different statutes and court decisions to encompass pretty much any contractor seeking to escape a lawsuit. This test merely asks if a contractor views and conveys itself as religious, with heavy deference for an employer’s own sense of its ‘religious purpose.’ It covers for-profit corporations so long as they swear they are motivated by religion.

Stern concluded:

The Trump administration has spent years enshrining pro-discrimination rules into the law. Across federal agencies, his allies have sought to implement cruel regulations that legalize bigotry in schools, hospitals, universities, and other workplaces.

Bostock limited the reach of this campaign, and the Biden administration can eventually undo all these policies. But Trump has also stacked the federal bench with cruel hacks eager to roll back the rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ people. They will continue Trump’s crusade long after he has left office. Scalia’s rule might not survive for long, but it gives us a preview of the looming battles over employers’ authority to impose their own bigotries on their workforce.

People’s World adds that the new ruling will come into effect on January 8, allowing contractors who identify themselves as “faith-based” to employ “individuals of a particular religion” – in other words, their own. And it expands the range of groups that “preferment” exemption covers.

Critics said DOL’s rule is way too broad in allowing groups to call themselves “religious” and thus discriminate against workers. It would now include for-profit businesses, for example, several said. All they’d have to do is call themselves “religious.”

One union said the DOL’s new rule:

Could lead businesses to feign religiosity solely for the purpose of cloaking discriminatory activity.

Another raised concerns that the rule crosses into territory proscribed by the US constitutional ban on the government’s:

Establishment of religion by authorizing federal contractors to advance their religious preferences and practices through the receipt of federal funds and the performance of public functions.