President Joe Biden on Friday fired Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) General Counsel Sharon Gustafson after she refused his request to resign.
Gustafson, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019, had been an advocate for religious believers who felt they were being discriminated against in the workplace, particularly when their religious beliefs conflicted with “woke” ideology. But the professed Catholic Biden, as witness his enthusiasm for the Equality Act, is hostile to any religious beliefs that don’t toe the progressive line, and that is almost certainly why Gustafson was terminated and all evidence of her work on behalf of believers was scrubbed from the EEOC’s website.
In a letter to Biden, Gustafson “respectfully decline[d]” to resign, noting that she had been appointed to a four-year term in keeping with the statute creating her position. “At the time I was nominated,” Gustafson recalled, “I was asked if I would commit to do my best to fulfill my four-year term, and I answered yes. Unless prevented from doing so, I intend to honor that commitment.”
“So far as I know,” she wrote, “no previous General Counsel has been fired for being appointed by the wrong political party.”
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Gustafson went on to list several accomplishments of the general counsel’s office during her tenure.
Then she came to the nub of the matter: “Also during my term, I established a Religious Discrimination Work Group that hosted a series of Listening Sessions in which a diverse group of representatives — including Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs — recommended ways the EEOC could improve its response to employees who experience religious discrimination.”
Excerpts of the report from that work group obtained by the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher reveal that people of faith feel “pressured or forced to participate in activities that violate their religious beliefs” in order to remain employed. Among the worrisome activities were “vaccinations, abortion procedures, providing transgender drugs for children, and trainings on diversity, inclusion, or sensitivity that require Participants to affirm certain practices or beliefs.” Some said they were afraid to express their religious beliefs at work. Many also felt that the EEOC was not “friendly to their religious beliefs” and that it “prioritizes claims of race and sex discrimination over religious discrimination.”
In her letter, Gustafson pointed out that “the Work Group built on a 2016 initiative of the Obama-Biden White House and Department of Justice to promote religious freedom and combat religious discrimination.” But 2016 might as well be 1816 now that that the hard Left is in charge; religious freedom cannot be allowed if it stands in the way of their agenda. Thus, the work group’s report was removed from the EEOC’s website shortly after Biden’s inauguration. Similarly, a podcast on the work group that Gustafson published in early February was also taken down “days later,” she noted.
“Why would the Biden administration want to axe these, if not to signal that defending religious liberty in the workplace does not matter to this administration?” asked Dreher.
Constitutionally, of course, the EEOC should not exist, and the federal government should not be in the business of preventing discrimination by private-sector employers. However, the disagreement between Biden and Gustafson was not about Uncle Sam’s proper role but about whether his muscle would be used to help religious believers when their faith conflicts with the Left’s ideology, especially the LGBT agenda.
Gustafson knows it, and so does EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas. In a series of tweets, Lucas, also a Trump appointee, wrote, “I find the action taken today by the White House against our independent agency to be deeply troubling, a break from long-established norms respected by presidents of both parties, an injection of partisanship where it had been absent, and telling evidence of what ‘unity’ actually means to this President and his Administration.”
“The actions taken by this Administration are quite telling as to their priorities … and one can safely assume that combating religious discrimination — or retaliation, frankly, given Ms. Gustafson’s firing — is not one of them,” she added. “Instead, it appears that this Administration intends to achieve unity through uniformity by removing all dissenting actors, thought, and content from the federal government, the public square, and the marketplace.”
