Civil liberties advocates oppose President Joe Biden’s proposed rescission of a Trump-era broadening of a regulatory exemption protecting religious employers from being forced to hire individuals who don’t share the organization’s faith views or practices.
The 2019 proposal was amended in 2020 and became law in January 2021 just before President Donald Trump left office. Now, according to OFCCP under Biden, the previous broadening required that religious freedom “must be construed in favor of the broadest protection of religious exercise ‘permitted by the U.S. Constitution and law.’”
Prior to the Trump revision, federal officials usually recognized the right of religious organizations to hire individuals who shared a particular group’s faith principles and practices.
The Trump rule was intended to make clear that an individual couldn’t be fired because of a religious-based objection to being required to participate in actions or pronouncements favoring homosexual or transgender practices. In addition, an employer could legally decline to hire an individual whose sexual practices or claimed gender conflicted with a clearly stated religious belief.
“The government should never fund businesses that justify discrimination based on religious beliefs. And American taxpayers should never be forced to be complicit in discrimination,” she wrote.
But public interest law firms specializing in litigation on behalf of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom of practice and assembly said the Biden administration’s attempt to repeal the Trump-era regulation indicates an anti-religion prejudice.
Both First Liberty Institute and Liberty Counsel are representing hundreds of employees of the U.S. military and the federal civilian workforce, as well as corporations, health care organizations, and private businesses in seeking to force the Biden administration to recognize religious exemptions to the president’s recent orders requiring workers to receive the vaccination against the CCP virus.
Biden’s OFCCP proposal creates an unusual situation in which a change in presidential administrations leads in less than a year to a single agency completely reversing itself on an important major policy issue.
The OFCCP’s rescission notice said that “the 2020 rule’s departures from Title VII principles and case law are likely to increase rather than decrease confusion about the application of the Executive Order 11246 religious exemption.
“Furthermore, to the extent the 2020 rule reflects the previous administration’s policy judgments regarding deviating from Title VII case law and principles, the present administration has evaluated the range of permissible policy options and determined that a return to its traditional approach of applying Title VII case law and principles will promote clarity and consistency in the application of the exemption.”
An estimated one-quarter of all employers in the United States receive federal contracts or are sub-contractors on such agreements between the government and private businesses.
