Recent moves within the Trump administration reveal the direction of government oversight that is likely to rule for the coming four years.
The President has initiated an intra-governmental witch hunt (a term that he likes to use prolifically when he thinks someone is after him personally) to root out, in his words, “anti-Christian weaponization of government.” (“Weaponization” is another word that has come into much too frequent use lately.)
According to Politico, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sent an internal cable asking employees to report instances of their co-workers displaying perceived [bold added] anti-Christian bias in the State Department. This smacks of the practices of the old Nazi party of ratting out your neighbors, or the McCarthy era period when all those called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee were expected to reveal compatriots thought to be involved in communist activities.
The Washington Post has reported on the activities of the new Department of Veterans Affairs director, Douglas A. Collins, who is following Trump’s directive with a vengeance. He is establishing an agency “task force,” which asks employees to submit any instance of “anti-Christian discrimination.”
Before discussing the VA task force in further depth, a short biography of Mr. Collins may be appropriate.
He is a former officer in the Air Force, serving as a Chaplain. He studied at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and was in Congress from 2007 to 2021. His political positions found him opposing abortion and the Affordable Care Act. He voiced distrust of the validity of the 2020 election and rejects scientific consensus on climate change. He has an “A” rating from the NRA. He opposes same-sex marriage, the Equality Act, and voted against the 2013 Violence Against Women Act.
His agency task force will be seeking examples of adverse actions taken by VA in response to requests for holiday observances, display of Christian imagery or symbols, and exemptions to vaccine mandates. (Guess he’s been hobnobbing with RFK, Jr. and would prefer that VA employees bring communicable diseases to work with them.) The task force will also be looking for adverse actions against staff who decline to participate in activities “inconsistent with Christian views.” Since “Christian views” vary so widely across the broad spectrum of Christian denominations, it should be interesting to see which are included or excluded.
The task force will also seek information regarding informal agency policies that may be “hostile to Christian views.” Once again, there’s those indeterminate “views”— and if the policies are informal, how can they be a part of any perceived punishment? If these policies prompt VA providers to leave under threat or fear of being fired or punished for not being Christian enough, the services to veterans all across America will suffer.
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has commented that the task force risks using religious freedom (apparently a freedom granted only to recognized Christians) to “justify bigotry, discrimination, and the subversion of our civil rights laws.”
Ironically, while all the “anti-Christian” activity is being rooted out, it has been reported that over the past five years there have been four times as many reported anti-Jewish hate crimes as anti-Christian hate crimes, despite the fact that Jews make up only about two percent of the population while Christians compose about two-thirds of the population.
These “anti-Christian bias” hypotheses abound all across the current administration, despite the fact that there has never been any evidence provided that these biases persist on an agency-level rate.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has accused the Biden administration of “abusing and targeting Christians,” without evidence.
She stated: “Protecting Christians from bias is not favoritism.” Of course, it is if Christianity is the only religion provided protection.
We are a diversified society, observing scores of different religions – or none at all. And all of us deserve protection from discrimination and hate-filled actions based solely on what we believe or choose not to believe.
To emphasize some mythological “anti-Christian bias” does no service to either our government or the people in power and only tends to foment distrust and fear of those who may hold divergent views of religion. It is simply a tactic used to divide the public, to create a “bogeyman” where none exists, and to use that division as a means to hold power. We’ve seen it before, and we must not fall prey to its insidiousness again.
Much of the information in this article came from the Washington Post report of Jeremy Roebuck and Hannah Natanson.
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Written by Chuck Witt. Cross-posted from the WinCity Voices.
