Stealthy Christianists

The other day I linked to this article in a post, from the New York Times:

Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission

WASHINGTON, June 13 — In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations canthat the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict.

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.”

It was really this part that got me in a snit:

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...

Earlier, I had posted about the way the Republican Party uses the AIDS issue to reward it's most important political supporting group, the religious right. There are the more obvious ways they attempt to do this, like nominating Supreme Court Justices who will chip away at Roe v. Wade, anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendments, ID in public schools, etc. These are the public faces of theocracy in America. Liberals in the past have made the mistake of deeming these bones to be thrown to the religious right, not to be taken seriously in any real sense. The chipping away at Roe by the Supreme Court proves this is baldly wrong, of course, but it is in these less-publicized sneak attacks that the most damaging Christianist inroads are being made, because it puts Christianists in positions of authority, where they can decide just exactly how to interepret whose civil rights to protect, and in what manner. The effects of this will last long after the administration that put them in power is gone