It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than 200 days since President Donald Trump took office for the second time. It feels like about 200 years. But however you measure time, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would like you to know it has been busy these last 200 trips ’round the sun. Busy with what, you say? Protecting religious freedom in the workplace, of course. Well, a very narrow view of religious freedom.
The EEOC’s press release touting its “200 Days of EEOC Action to Protect Religious Freedom at Work” is a laughably thin little thing, even aside from the nonsense of its content. It’s got to be hard these days for agencies to pretend like they’re doing actual work and to list achievements.
Since Trump and his appointees have focused the whole of government on terrorizing people conservatives don’t like, glowing mid-year reports can be kinda hard to come by. So the EEOC landed on the one thing this administration could genuinely say was consistently being addressed: the importance of letting conservative anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists do whatever they want as long as they say it’s religious.
EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas
Yes, the lead—and lengthiest—section in this thing is all about vaccine mandates. The signature achievement of the EEOC these days seems to be shaking down health care companies that had the gall to enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates: “Under the Trump Administration, the EEOC is taking bold and aggressive steps to remedy the widespread civil rights harms during the pandemic.”
There’s definitely gonna be a statue of EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas next to the nation’s other civil rights greats someday. Just picture a sort of Mount Rushmore with Martin Luther King Jr., Harvey Milk, John Lewis, and the lady whose life's work seems to revolve around whining about diversity and going on Fox News.
Lucas’s big civil rights achievements regarding vaccines are unfortunately a wee bit vague. While the press release boasts of the EEOC recovering “over $55 million” for workers forced to endure the terror of the COVID-19 vaccine, it mentions only one recovery with a dollar sign, last week’s extraction of $1 million from Mercyhealth for being insufficiently solicitous of anti-vaxxers who cloak their conspiracy-mongering in religion.
Who else did the EEOC leap to protect? There’s a link to a settlement the EEOC is clearly pretty proud of. A charter school in Oklahoma had the gall to ask the person claiming their religion forbids them from getting vaccines to provide a letter from clergy saying that. No way, said civil rights icon Andrea Lucas! Bridge too far! If rando teacher dude says his sky god doesn’t want him to get a vaccine, you have no right to ask for any explanation or evidence of those beliefs. That’s real religious freedom.
So what other big triumphs did the EEOC have in the last seven months? Basically, suing any company that ever made a conservative Christian sad. The funniest part of listing a bunch of these things as achievements is that many are just links to the EEOC announcing the filing of a lawsuit, which is not the same as winning a lawsuit or protecting workers.
But each press release does always feature a Lucas quote like “Employers need to remember that religious rights are not second-class rights, but rather part of our nation’s first principles.” And there’s “The novelty of the COVID-19 pandemic is not a shield for employers to engage in garden-variety discrimination.” Such stirring words!
But what about all the combating antisemitism that this administration is so good at? Well, the EEOC is claiming that the $21 million bribe that Columbia University had to pay as part of its massive payoff to the administration is the “the largest EEOC employment discrimination resolution publicly announced in nearly 20 years; the agency’s largest ever for victims of antisemitism; the most significant religious discrimination EEOC settlement for workers of any faith; and is part of a historic multi-agency settlement achieved by the Trump Administration.”
Whoa! Historic! Would you like some details about how many victims there were, how much money they will recover, and the other normal details that would form part of a boast about the world’s biggest settlement? Well, you can’t have them, because this isn’t a real settlement.
Instead, the money will be distributed as it would in a class action. There will be a claims administrator who will send a notice to all Columbia employees to respond to a questionnaire where they can describe how they were discriminated against, and the claims administrator will get to decide if they deserve money.
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So, the administration gets to continue to be the arbiter of what is and isn’t antisemitic, but now they’ve got $21 million of Columbia’s money to do it with. Let’s just all set aside our uneasy feelings about the government demanding a list of Jewish people and trust in future Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Andrea Lucas, shall we?
Last but actually seriously not least, the EEOC highlighted its work standing up a task force to protect religious freedom in the federal government. Oh wait, sorry. The task force is only for eradicating anti-Christian bias in the federal government. Man, they can’t even pretend, even just for the duration of a press release, that religious freedom means anything except coddling Christian conservatives for the length of a press release.
