President Donald Trump set up a task for to eradicate anti-Christian bias and issued an executive order mandating this report. It found that the Biden DOJ routinely and disproportionately targeted Christians for investigations and prosecution.
Tony Perkins of Family Research Council says it weaponized the government to please certain favored groups.
“It lays bare the mechanisms that the Biden administration used to inhibit religious freedom, working in concert with abortion and LGBT groups to weaponize government,” Perkins says.
Camille Varone, an assistant attorney general with the DOJ, spoke with Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch,” noting how other agencies not listed in the task force were also eager to help with the report.
“What we found was that the Biden administration was willing to tolerate Christians up to a point. So, when Christians held their traditional religious views privately within the four corners of their church, the Biden administration would tolerate that. But the conflicts arose when Christians started to act on their beliefs,” Varone states.
Therefore, when the Biden administration leaned toward policies that didn’t line up with Christian beliefs regarding life, family, human sexuality and how people identified and viewed themselves, that is when conflict occurred, she says.
Among the findings, the Biden DOJ aggressively prosecuted non-violent pro-life protesters using the so-called Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The FBI investigated traditional Catholics, it discriminated against Christians who wanted to foster or adopt children, and it denied Christians and faith-based organizations equal access to government services.
“They went through and cataloged agency by agency what the Biden administration did to inhibit the ability of people to live by their biblical faith,” Perkins explains.
Varone describes how the government worked with Planned Parenthood among other organizations to monitor pro-life Americans.
“The prosecutors knew that they were constrained by policy and constitutional rights, but there's emails where they describe that part of the benefit of working with these groups is that the non-governmental organizations could poke around on the internet in ways that the department couldn't,” Varone says.
The Biden administration, Perkins says, showed reckless disregard of the religious freedom of Christians and their churches.
“How the Biden was adamant about forcing this agenda, even at the risk of trampling upon constitutional freedom,” Perkins states.
He says the Trump administration has racked up a long list of wins, but this report rises to the top.
“This report is one of the most valuable things that the Trump administration has done to date,” Perkins says.
Varone explains that this is only the first step going forward and acknowledges that the last chapter of the report shows the Trump administration’s actions in fixing this.
“There is another year of the task force, and there's also ongoing effort within all of our different agencies to continue to look at what happened to try to figure out if there were further injustices,” Verona states. “Information keeps coming out as we look, and it's something that we're taking very seriously and we'll continue to report on as we get more information.”
