Your Dept of Justice: Crumbling The Wall Between Church and State Since 2002
Okay, this morning my Pandagon post had to with the Dept. of Justice's "religious-rights" unit, and how its agenda seems to align pretty closely with that of the Evangelicals who pushed Bush into office both times and have been demanding some sops to their values ever since. But I don't think anybody read past the fold, thinking that the story how DOJ is supporting the right of the Salvation Army to discriminate against its employees even though the it is receiving public funds, is all there is.
But since the story has lots more to it (and it took me a long time to write), I am going to make YOU read it. Okay, I can't actually make you read it, but I can post it here. And I will. And here it is. To quote Pastor Swank, "so there!
======================= So, we now have a unit in the Justice Department siding against social workers who claim that their employer is imposing a new religious litmus test on them. and instituting policies that impact on their ability to get results. Gee, and it was just last week when President Bush said, "We ought to judge faith-based groups by results, not by their religion."
A June 2003 American Prospect piece has more about the DOJ's "religious-rights" efforts: The nexus of the religious right in the administration may be Ashcroft's Justice Department, which is well positioned to effect pro-Christian legal changes. [...] Eric Treene, formerly litigation director at the conservative Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, was appointed in June 2002 to serve as the Justice Department's special counsel for religious discrimination, a newly created position. According to Yeshiva University law professor and church-state specialist Marci Hamilton, Treene has been "in the trenches of trying to get religious entities special privileges under the law." No wonder the conservative Christian group Faith and Action, which seeks to remind legislators about the "prominent role that the word of God played in the creation of our nation and its laws," celebrated Treene's appointment as "a new day for Christians in Washington." So far Treene has proved responsive to groups seeking to amplify legal protections for Christians. For example, following a complaint by the archconservative Liberty Legal Institute of Plano, Texas, Treene headed an investigation of Texas Tech University biology professor Michael Dini, who had promulgated a policy requiring that students seeking medical-school letters of recommendation from him be able to "truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer" to the question, "How do you think the human species originated?" Despite the fact that recommendation writing is a voluntary activity, this was deemed discrimination against creationists. After Treene and the Justice Department opened their investigation, Dini changed his policy. [...] So forget about counting the mentions of God in Bush's speeches; it's legal coordination between the Bush administration and the religious right that could truly cause Thomas Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state to crumble.
When not fighting against evolution, the DOJ has been involved in other cases that seem to "serve specific goals of conservative religious organizations, a key political constituency of the Bush administration," to quote the LAT piece.
For instance, the Department has filed briefs in three suits supporting the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), which seeks to establish "Good News Clubs" in schools. (The way it works is that a local evangelical church, working through the CEF, will "adopt" a school, and sets up a weekly religious program there that starts right after school lets out. The clubs feature biblical lessons, prayers, and religious games and songs.)
The CEF site explains the goal of the Clubs: As with all CEF ministries, the purpose of after-school Good News Clubs is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living.
Despite the fact that the group won a 2001 Supreme Court case giving it the right to hold Good News Club mettings on public school property, the idea of helping fundamentalist Christian churches conduct after-school meetings IN schools in order to evangelize children is something that not everyone feels comfortable with (even if the kids are supposed to have their parents' permission to attendthe club). So, in New Jersey and Maryland, schools have refused to pass out the group's literature, claiming that doing so would violate church/state boundaries. CEF sued, and DOJ supported their suits. In another case, a school district charged CEF a fee to to use the building, even though they didn't charge groups like the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. DOJ also joined that suit. Gordon Todd, a civil rights division official, said in an interview that the Justice Department got involved because some local jurisdictions had refused to open their doors to the religious groups, or imposed new barriers to entry, in defiance of the high court ruling. "That deserves some follow-up litigation," he said, comparing the enforcement efforts to those the department undertook in the face of local resistance to the Supreme Court's school desegregation cases dating to Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. Still, some critics wonder whether such cases warrant Justice Department involvement, especially if the litigants are already well-represented by private lawyers. "This is not the equivalent of the Southern resistance to the black vote that you need to have the Justice Department pursuing it," said Marc Stern, co-director of the Commission for Law and Social Action of the American Jewish Congress in New York. "The litigation goes very nicely without the United States government intervening.
Hey, murdering civil rights workers and not passing out literature about an after-school religious program are both pretty much the same thing, when you think about it.
Interestingly enough, DOJ has also conducted at least six bias investigations triggered by complaints from the Liberty Legal Institute (the group mentioned by the American Prospect in the case of the student who sued the professor for not writing him a letter of recommendation). The LLI, which is based in Plano, Texas, is "the legal division" of the Free Market Foundation. LLI's chief counsel, Kelly Shackelford, is also President of Free Market. Per its web site, "Free Market serves as the statewide public policy council associated with Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family."
Shackelford told the Star-Tribune that after being hired by the Free Market Foundation, "a Christian policy group that lobbies against things such as same-sex marriages and abortion," he convinced the foundation's board of directors, "which includes prominent business people, philanthropists and Southern Baptists," that they needed another group to handle litigation. And thus LLI was born.
(Oh, and the Dallas Observer says that donors to the Free Market Foundation include Wal-Mart heir John Walton, as well as James Lightner of Dallas, "a generous financial supporter of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke."
So, LLI is a Texas-based Christian policy group associated with Dobson's Focus on the Family -- does that help explain why the DOJ's religious rights unit would get involved in at least six of its legal group's cases? You can call me cynical, but I think that it does.
(Oh, and you can read more about the Dini case here. it seems that the student never took a class from Dini and didn't actually want a letter of recommendation from him -- the suit was just to force Dini to change his website message, and to thus strike a blow for the forces of creationism. Why DOJ had to get involved in that one is beyond me.)
The LAT mentions another LLI-instituted case in which a DOJ lawyer launched a probe of an elementary school that had forbidden a fourth-grader from handing out candy canes with a religious message at school-sponsored holiday parties.
LLI filed a temporary restraining order on behalf to the boy despite the fact that the school district, even before the suit was filed, had decided that the parties were actually non-instructional time and students could hand out whatever they wanted at the parties. Editor's Note: The fact that public schools, and ultimately taxpayers, are being plagued by unnecessary litigation by far right religious legal organizations is bad enough. What is extremely scary and should be closely watched is that the U.S. Department of Justice is getting involved. Is it because it is Texas or is this a forewarning of “big brother” type behavior to come from the Justice Department?
So, why the hell did LLI go forward with the suit? And why did the DOJ get involved in it at all? Maybe the reason DOJ got involved is because of all the publicity generated by Shackelford's organization. Many LLI cases seems to consist of the institute finding a case of "religious persecution" that could probably be resolved without legal action, publicizing the hell out of it, and then, after they have won a legal victory, announcing that the forces of liberalism and secularism have been fought back ... for the moment.
In the Star-Tribune story, Shackelford brags about protecting the rights of a group of senior citizens who were told by the new city manager that they couldn't hold devotionals in the senior center any longer. LLI took up their cause, won in court, and the seniors are now free to use the city-owned building for sermons, prayers, and gospel singing. (DOJ got involved in this case too.) Balch Springs Mayor James Kelsey blamed Liberty Legal for turning a minor dispute into an ugly legal battle that brought the town bad publicity. After the seniors sued, the city signed an agreement in January allowing them to continue saying blessings over meals and listening to inspirational sermons. "They won, so they had to have good counsel," said Kelsey, who also criticized Liberty Legal for trying to charge the city $78,000 in legal fees. "But the tactics. ... This wasn't tried in a court. This was tried in the news." At their modest six-person headquarters in a Plano office building, Shackelford and Hiram Sasser, director of litigation, don't apologize for trying to publicize their cases through frequent news conferences and releases. "It's really important because what we're after is education," Shackelford said. "If we do a case like Balch Springs, that case is going to help the 16 people that we represent and all the future senior citizens that want to pray at senior centers."
It's probably noteworthy that Shackelford testified about this case at a Senate hearing on "hostility to religious expression in the public square" (chaired by John Cornyn, R-Texas), who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee. So, maybe Comyn's interest in LLI is why DOJ has involved itself in so many of LLI's cases. Shackelford told the LA Times, "I think if I am the Justice Department, they like groups like us who bring cases that I think present a very clear picture" of discrimination," adding that not all its cases involve Christian conservatives.
Why the heck would DOJ like groups that bring them cases where the alleged victims are already being effectively represented by said groups? And why does the government involve itself in matters that seem to need no governmental assistance? (See also this Findlaw article detailing a case where a case where the city of Maui tried to enforce zoning ordinances against a church group, which then sued -- the two sides were near settlement when DOJ entered the dispute and charged Maui with religious dicrimination, even though there was no pattern or actual discrimination against religious groups by the city.)
The only purpose served by DOJ involvement in such cases would seem to be a political one: that of showing evangelicals that in return for their support, the Bush administration is fighting on their behalf.
Oh, and it's true that not all of LLI's cases involve Christian conservatives -- some have involved fighting to keep homosexuals from being adopting children or being foster parents (of particular interest might be this stunt, in which LLI sued on the behalf of a bunch of orphans, some of them infants, who supposedly didn't want to be adopted by homosexuals). Another case involved a student who claimed he was being repressed by PC campus speech codes. One involved keeping Planned Parenthood from giving birth control pill to minors without parental consent. But all of their cases seem to involve issues near and dear to the hearts of Christian conservatives. So, it's nice that LLI now has the Department of Justice carrying their water.
As the Dallas Observer said in the article about the the Freedom Foundation and its off-shoots: What critics of the Religious Right find most fascinating, and not a little distressing, is that even with all their power, they still act as though they're victims. They fight to protect their "religious freedoms," even though they're the dominant religion. They speak of tolerance, but they fight to keep homosexual couples from having the same rights and protections they take for granted. "There is a long-standing fear in that community that they will be sold out," says Harvey Kronberg, editor of the political online newsletter Quorum Report, who has covered the state Legislature for two decades and has known Ford for years. "As much as they loved Ronald Reagan, they feel he used social conservatives to get elected and turned out to be more interested in defense and the economy."
And it it takes seting up a unit in the Department of Justice to make them feel like the Bush administration hasn't abandoned them, then I guess its worth taking us a few steps closer to theocracy to do it.
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