Civil rights under the Bush Administration is only about the freedom of fundamentalists

It used to be that the Justice Department's Civil Rights division was about addressing issues of racism. But under this president, civil rights is no longer about addressing deeply-entrenched attitudes and policies that kept a group of people in a lesser position for generations. Instead it's about the make-believe grievances of people who are free to worship at the church of their choice and to believe what they like. The only freedom that Christians who feel oppressed in this culture don't have is the freedom to shove their religion down the throats of those who want the freedom to believe differently.

But under George W. Bush, the freedom of the rest of us to believe in things like scientific method and reality doesn't matter. Only the freedom of the religious matters:

The shift at the Justice Department has significantly altered the government’s civil rights mission, said Brian K. Landsberg, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and a former Justice Department lawyer under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Not until recently has anyone in the department considered religious discrimination such a high priority,” Professor Landsberg said. “No one had ever considered it to be of the same magnitude as race or national origin.”

Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement that the agency had “worked diligently to enforce the federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on religion.”

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

¶Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.

Along with its changed civil rights mission, the department has also tried to overhaul the roster of government lawyers who deal with civil rights. The agency has transferred or demoted some experienced civil rights litigators while bringing in lawyers, including graduates of religious-affiliated law schools and some people vocal about their faith, who favor the new priorities. That has created some unease, with some career lawyers disdainfully referring to the newcomers as “holy hires.”

Under the Bush Administration, ONLY religious rights matter. And while dealing with sex trafficking is a laudable goal of the Department, the overall mission (so to speak) of the Justice Department these days tells me that this is less about women being victimized (which I would applaud) and more about stamping out sex -- particularly given the free pass which the president's brother Neil got in his own little adventure with Thai prostitutes.

I grew up in a town that was dominated by "The Big White Church" -- a whitewashed Presbyterian church that was the stuff of Norman Rockwell illustrations. There was a Catholic church, and Episcopal church, a Lutheran church, and even a synagogue in that most WASP-y of towns. And somehow, for the most part, the people who attended these houses of worship didn't feel beleaguered and didn't feel that they were unable to practice their religion.

It wasn't until the rise of fundamentalism -- both Christian and Jewish -- in this country that religious people decided that their faith was more about grievances than about spirituality. Fundamentalism of any stripe is about one-true-wayism; the idea that MY faith is the one true faith and that I have a mandate from God Himself to convert the nonbelievers and save their souls. The Jewish ultra-Orthodox don't have conversion as part of their theology, so they seek to carve out ghettos of their own making. But at least they aren't sending religious tracts home with schoolchildren who believe differently.

European history is rife with the consequences of one-true-wayism. If you want to buy the Administration's line that the World Trade Center was destroyed by one-true-wayist Muslims who "hate our freedom" (a line which is utter horsepuckey, but stay with me here), we've seen the consequences of religious fundamentalism right here in this country right within our lifetime.

As soon as you have ANY individual or group claiming that only he, or his group, knows the TRUTH about the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything, you have a dangerous notion that has no business in the affairs of state. If being able to believe what you like and worship with like-minded souls isn't enough for you, too bad. Those who originally settled this country did so to escape religious oppression -- and then promptly went out and killed a bunch of indigenous people who didn't live the way they did. Seeking to force others to live your way may be part of human nature; but this Great Experiment we call the United States of America was designed to allow people of many walks of life to live in the same space under a government that allows, but does not endorse, any one of them.