Like other components of the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has become a conduit for advancing the Religious Right’s agenda.
Under this White House, the DOJ has overhauled its Civil Rights Division to focus large amounts of attention on helping “faith-based” organizations receive grants and trolling the land looking for supposed discrimination against evangelical Christians.
The department’s fervid focus on advancing Religious Rights concerns makes its claim “to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans” a mere platitude.
The Civil Rights Division, whose most august moment undoubtedly was its fight to end segregation last century, now has within its fold something called the “Task Force on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.” The task force, headed by Steven McFarland, is intended to help religious groups obtain government funding.
Before joining the DOJ in 2005, McFarland toiled away at Religious Right outfits such as the Prison Fellowship International and the Christian Legal Society.
Recently the department advertised for a contractor to run secular and faith-based programs for inmates at several federal prisons. The solicitation, as the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s Roundtable E-Newsletter pointed out, is dramatically scaled back from a solicitation sent out last year.
That notice, seeking a group to run a “single faith” program, seemed tailored specifically for the Charles Colson-founded Prison Fellowship Ministry. The proposal was subsequently rescinded after Americans United warned the DOJ that limiting a government program to “single faith” services is a clear violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.
American United Senior Litigation Counsel Alex Luchenitser told The Roundtable that the new notice was an improvement, but “still seems to contemplate the use of federal funding for religious instruction, which is plainly unconstitutional.”
In addition to the “faith-based” task force, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in February announced at a leadership gathering of the Southern Baptist Convention an initiative euphemistically dubbed the “First Freedom Project.”
Gonzales told the conservative religious leaders that the project, to be led by Eric Treene, would ramp up the Civil Rights Division’s ongoing work to halt religious discrimination. (Treene, like McFarland, comes to the DOJ from an outfit that opposes church-state separation, the Becket Fund.) In his announcement, which included a new Web site and a series of seminars nationwide, Gonzales released a 43-page document purportedly showing the DOJ’s hard work on behalf of religious freedom.
Civil liberties groups were quick to point out that the DOJ has some odd ideas about what constitutes religious liberty. Its lawyers included in the report the DOJ’s support for religious school voucher subsidies and backing for religious discrimination in hiring in government-funded faith-based projects – both stances at odds with true religious liberty.
Treene and McFarland aren’t the only Religious Right operatives at DOJ. Also serving as a senior counsel to Gonzales is Monica Goodling, a graduate of TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University. Goodling recently refused to testify before a congressional committee regarding her involvement in the dismissals of a string of U.S. attorneys. Knight Ridder reported that Goodling was a “frequent figure in department e-mails” over those firings. She resigned from the DOJ on April 6.
Regent’s Web site boasts that 150 of its graduates serve in the Bush administration. The Web site also states that Regent is “America’s premier graduate school dedicated to combining quality education with biblical teachings” and “continues to produce Christian leaders who will make a difference, who will change the world.”
The DOJ’s close connections to the Religious Right and its work on behalf of the Religious Right agenda spurs troubling concerns in nation that is supposed to reflect democracy, not theocracy.
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