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Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued on Friday a lengthy but sufficiently vague guidance on protecting "religious liberty." It is what one observer aptly termed a blueprint for structural inequality that encourages federal agencies to perpetuate discrimination in the name of religion. Women and LGBTQ Americans will bear the brunt of its intent, but once unleashed, so-called "religious liberty" can be used to justify discrimination against any minority. Buzzfeed writes:
The guidance says the government cannot unduly burden people or certain businesses from practicing their faith, noting, “The free exercise of religion includes the right to act or abstain from action in accordance with one’s religious beliefs.” [...]
The guidance memo, which avoided mentioning pending cases by name but did refer to the ongoing controversy over contraception coverage in Obamacare, directs federal agencies to observe 20 “principles of religious liberty.” Among them, it says that religious employers are entitled to hire only workers whose beliefs and conduct are “consistent with the employer's’ religious beliefs” — a directive adopted under former President George W. Bush — and that some of the legal principles extend “not just to individuals, but also to organizations, associations, and at least some for-profit corporations.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services on Friday announced new rules that will allow employers with a “moral” or “religious” objection to stop covering contraception for employees.
One portion of the guidance directs lawyers in the Justice Department to scrutinize all proposed federal regulations, saying that the department won’t concur in the issuance of any rule that conflicts with the religious guidance.
If you have any doubt that Sessions is on a crusade to enable not just the religious, but Christians in particular, to discriminate against others in the name of freedom, you can put them to rest.
His Justice Department recently decided to intervene in two cases it wasn't a party to—both of them involve the "free speech" rights of Christians:
Sessions has further gone out of his way to argue that both gay and transgender Americans are not protected from discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—a view that has been steadily evolving in the courts in favor of LGBTQ protections under the statute.
The sum of Sessions’ body of work gives you the beginning and end of where he is headed with his Justice Department: The Constitution provides Christians with ironclad and unassailable First Amendment "free speech" rights that trump the freedoms of other Americans, whose rights either aren’t as worthy (women) or don’t exist at all (LGBTQs).
The HHS decision issued Friday that cuts women’s access to contraception falls perfectly within Sessions' grand scheme of who is deserving of justice and who isn’t.