For the second time in two months, a writer at a major newspaper has painted religious liberty advocates as merely abusing their cause as a guise for bigotry. A USA Today op-ed published this week claimed that “The Trump Justice Department has turned ‘religious liberty’ into a license to discriminate.” This seems to mirror a similar article which recently ran in the New York Times entitled “We are Taking Religious Freedom Too Far.”
The author of the USA Today article, Michael J. Stern, a 25-year veteran of the Department of Justice, claims that not only is the DOJ siding with religious liberty advocates in an apparently problematic majority of cases (Imagine the DOJ siding with the First Amendment — how archaic), but also that DOJ only sides with conservative Christian religious liberty claims, not those involving other faiths.
This is misleading. In March, for instance, the DOJ filed in support of a lawsuit from the Ramapugh Mountain Indians alleging the Township of Mahwah violated the tribe’s religious rights. Clearly, Trump’s DOJ isn’t just supportive of religious freedom for Christians.
Stern also argued that the Trump administration doesn’t care about religious freedom for Muslims, yet this too is not so.
In April, the DOJ and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas reached an agreement with the City of Farmersville, Texas, to resolve a dispute alleging that the city violated the religious freedom of the Islamic Association of Collin County by denying their application to build a cemetery. That fact was apparently too inconvenient for the progressive narrative to be included in this USA Today op-ed.
Stern concluded by saying “If the first year of DOJ’s religious liberty task force has taught us anything, it is that there is little more than pretext at the core of its policies on religious freedom.” He then threw out a few outlandish hypothetical examples to try and hammer this point home.
Stern asked: “What will DOJ do when the owner of the most trendy restaurant in Washington, D.C., asserts a life of biblical adherence as justification for his refusal to serve well-known adulterers in Congress or the White House?”
Well, if the past is any indication of the future, the DOJ will attempt to be as fair and respectful of the First Amendment as they can possibly be.
Matt Sharp, legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, told me via e-mail:
The real problem isn’t the DOJ, it’s people like Stern who cherry pick so-called discriminatory cases guised as religious freedom causes, and leave out the work that the DOJ is doing that would tear his thesis apart. In fact, it kind of sounds like Stern wants to leave religious conservatives out in the cold. Who’s the bigot now?
