Unlike some Democrats, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s choice for running mate, isn’t neutral about religious liberty or pro-life issues: Her record shows she has aggressively opposed them both out of principle and for political gain. Religious liberty is hardly a lone conservative concept or a topic where only the political Right retains authority (it’s guaranteed by the Constitution). A look through Harris’s record as California’s attorney general and as a senator shows how she might govern on these issues alongside Biden, and it’s disturbing. She is hardly a centrist on these issues, as the media might portray her, and has actively worked against these ideals that many hold dear.
As an attorney, Harris held quite a bit of power, first as a prosecutor, then as a district attorney, and later as state attorney general, a position with incredible influence. Her record shows she didn’t exactly utilize the justice system to fight for the marginalized, discriminated, or vulnerable like she says.
For example, when Harris was a young prosecutor, she specialized in prosecuting child sexual abuse cases. But when she finally had power as an attorney general, and the Catholic Church’s widespread scandal revealing sex abuse of minors by priests came to light, Harris was virtually silent. “She did nothing,” Joey Piscitelli told the Associated Press in 2019. Piscitelli is the Northern California spokesman for SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
This is a double whammy for Harris, who used her reputation that she was tough on crime to run successfully for various offices but didn’t seem to use it when it really mattered. A true defender of religious liberty, which any attorney general should be, ensures that religion is not used as a ruse for discrimination, bigotry, or abuse — especially when children are involved.
Harris seems to disdain people of faith actively, and her record shows this too. When Hobby Lobby approached the Supreme Court asking for an exemption to Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate, Harris was already the attorney general of California. In 2014, she filed an amicus brief, telling the Supreme Court not to give Hobby Lobby a religious exemption. “Rights to the free exercise of religious beliefs, whether created by statute or by the Constitution, likewise protect the development and expression of an ‘inner sanctum’ of personal religious faith,” she wrote. “Free-exercise rights have thus also been understood as personal, relating only to individual believers and to a limited class of associations comprising or representing them.”
Worse, her logic was flawed. Like many who opposed the exemption, she claimed it would prevent women from getting comprehensive healthcare, which is absurd. Thankfully, the Supreme Court disagreed, and Hobby Lobby won that case in what is now a landmark ruling for religious liberty.
Harris’s religious bigotry isn’t just against Christians, it’s against religious minorities too. At the Daily Caller, Peter Hasson reported on another case of anti-religious bigotry from Harris.
As attorney general, Harris actively fought a lawsuit against a Sikh man named Trilochan Oberoi, a former prison guard who was barred from his job because he refused to shave the beard he kept out of religious conviction. Multiple religious liberty groups (including the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California) came to his aid. In a letter to then-Gov. Jerry Brown, the groups “complained that more than two years after the arbitration ruling, Harris’s office was ‘using California taxpayer dollars to vigorously oppose the right of Mr. Oberoi to work as a state corrections officer, thus jeopardizing the civil rights of Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, and indeed all others who still face the ignominy of having to choose between religious freedom and a job.’”
As a senator, Harris’s record hasn’t improved. Often, a centrist Democrat won’t touch the issue of religious liberty in an effort to look moderate or neutral. Not Harris. She (twice!) co-sponsored a bill called the Do No Harm Act that would weaken the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law President Bill Clinton signed that protects people with religious beliefs.
On abortion, Harris proves just as awful. As Alexandra DeSanctis wrote, “She is without question the most radically pro-abortion candidate to run for president or vice president in the history of our country. As a senator, Harris has cosponsored the most aggressively pro-abortion piece of federal legislation ever introduced, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would override state restrictions on abortions in the last three months of pregnancy, well after fetal viability.”
Harris also discriminated against judicial nominees for their religious beliefs. As the Washington Examiner’s Nic Rowan reported, “Harris stirred controversy in 2018 when she proposed that a Trump judicial nominee and member of the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus might not ‘fairly and impartially’ judge cases because of the organization’s allegiance to the Catholic Church.” But the Constitution bans religious tests for federal officeholders and employees, so a judicial nominee’s membership in a Catholic, pro-life, anti-same-sex marriage organization is not a valid reason to oppose their nomination.
Contrary to how she may portray herself, Harris is hardly a centrist. She might be tough on some crime, but she wasn’t tough when it counted and used her positions to discriminate against people of faith. Harris is fanatically opposed to protecting the unborn, people of faith, or religious liberty as a whole. Her record shows she has not stood idly by alongside centrist Democrats but has aggressively attacked one of our country’s core values: religious freedom.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
