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| Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (left) and Donald Trump (middle) think religious liberty means receiving federal funds while discriminating against taxpayers and then not showing common courtesy to those they are taking the money from. |
If you want yet another example of how religious right groups distort and weaponize religion as a tool for discrimination, look no further than yet another Trump Administration proposal geared to reward conservative evangelicals for their support at the expense of other Americans.
But allow me to take a different approach. First, I am going to post what the Family Research Council's president Tony Perkins
says about it:
Senators Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) must really miss the days of Barack Obama, when faith-based groups were treated like second-class citizens when it came to government programs. Every time a member of the president's team rolls back a rule and levels the playing field, the northwest Democrats kick and scream. For people who talk about equality so much, Senate liberals sure don't understand it.
Nothing really sums up the Left better than the first line of their protest letter to Secretary Alex Azar. "We write to strongly oppose the Department of Health and Human Services' proposed rule, 'Ensuring Equal Treatment of Faith-Based Organizations." In other words, what they support is the unequal treatment of faith-based organizations -- something the last administration had become quite good at. The pair of senators tries to argue that Trump's policy reinstating religious freedom is actually a secret attack on it -- a suggestion that would be funny if it weren't so outrageous.
"The proposed rule -- developed under the guise of religious liberty -- is actually... yet another step taken by President Trump to greenlight federally-funded discrimination," their letter claims. No one is quite sure how, since the whole point of the regulation is to make sure every organization -- religious or not -- is treated the same. What Obama's team liked to do was burden religious groups with special reporting or referral requirements, creating ridiculous hoops that no secular organization had to jump through. Of course, the idea was to persuade faith-based groups it was too much trouble -- or worse, too steep a compromise, to comply.
The new rule, just posted last month, guarantees that every qualified government organization has a seat at the table -- no matter what they believe. It appears by the words of Murray and Wyden not everyone believes in that kind of neutrality. They want religious groups to be disqualified from any government interaction before it starts! "We demand the Department put the American people first and withdraw the proposed rule," they write. But putting the American people first means engaging all of the diverse options for health care, education, adoption, and disaster relief. If the Trump administration listened to those on the Left, it would be jeopardizing billions of dollars in social services.
It's interesting how Perkins is deliberately vague about this rule. I doubt this is accidental.
