The veterans affairs department (VA) is ordering staff to report colleagues for instances of “anti-Christian bias” to a newly established taskforce, as part of Donald Trump’s push to reshape government policy on religious expression.
The VA secretary, Doug Collins, in an internal email seen by the Guardian, said the department had launched a taskforce to review the Biden administration’s “treatment of Christians”.
“The VA Task Force now requests all VA employees to submit any instance of anti-Christian discrimination to Anti-ChristianBiasReporting.@va.gov,” the email reads. “Submissions should include sufficient identifiers such as names, dates, and locations.”
The email states that the department will review “all instances of anti-Christian bias” but that it is specifically seeking instances including “any informal policies, procedures, or unofficially understandings hostile to Christian views”.
In addition, the department is seeking “any adverse responses to requests for religious exemptions under the previous vaccine mandates” and “any retaliatory actions taken or threatened in response to abstaining from certain procedures or treatments (for example: abortion or hormone therapy)”.
Donald Trump signed an executive order within weeks of his second term aimed at ending the “anti-Christian weaponization of government”, and announced the formation of a taskforce, led by the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to end all forms of “anti-Christian targeting and discrimination” in the government.
Bondi would work to “fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide”, Trump said in February.
Critics were quick to condemn Trump’s announcement at the time as a thinly veiled attempt to privilege evangelical Christianity over other religious minorities.
“If Trump really cared about religious freedom and ending religious persecution, he’d be addressing antisemitism in his inner circle, anti-Muslim bigotry, hate crimes against people of color and other religious minorities,” the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser, said in a statement.
“This taskforce is not a response to Christian persecution; it’s an attempt to make America into an ultra-conservative Christian nationalist nation.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
