According to Regent's own website, one in six of its alumni work for the government. Why is this distressing? Well put these articles by Charlie Savage, Dahlia Lithwick and Josh Marshall together and it becomes clear that the triumph of ideology over competence has reached startling levels (well less than half of hires in the Civil Rights Division actually have experience in that part of the law?), and that their crusades to install a Christianist agenda are leaving concerns and rights unprotected.
Under Ashcroft, career lawyers were systematically fired or forced out and replaced by members of conservative or Christian groups or folks with no civil rights experience. In the five years after 2001, the Civil Rights Division brought no voting cases - and only one employment case - on behalf of an African American. Instead, the division took up the "civil rights" abuses of reverse discrimination - claims of voter fraud or discrimination against Christians. On Feb. 20, Gonzales announced a new initiative called the First Freedom Project to carry out "even greater enforcement of religious rights for all Americans." In his view, the fight for a student's right to read a Bible in school is as urgent as the right to vote.Posted by armand at April 8, 2007 01:23 PM | TrackBack | Posted to
It's an extremely narrow definition of "Christian" too:
Posted by: binky at April 8, 2007 03:28 PM | PERMALINKIt made news when James Dobson said of Fred Thompson, a baptized member of the Church of Christ, that "I don't think he's a Christian." But his spokesman explains Dobson's point: “We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians.” So it's not just Catholics and Mormons: now all of mainstream Protestantism is "non-Christian" in the view of the Republican ayatollahs. It would be nice if political reporters made that clear to their readers.