Rev. Jennifer Butler is CEO of Faith in Public Life and former chair of the White House Council on Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships during the Obama administration. She is the author of "Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized." The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) One of the first things Christians teach our children is to love our neighbors and not to judge. We hear about how Jesus spent time with the outcasts, people in prison, and other downtrodden people who were rejected or punished for their differences by mainstream society.

Jennifer Butler

Yet far too often, politicians instead choose to use faith as a weapon to judge the same marginalized people that Jesus commanded us to love. This weaponization of faith as a political tool has grown more acute in the last few years, with politicians like President Donald Trump using so-called moral or religious objections to push their own discriminatory partisan agenda in defiance of the very values they claim to embrace.

Among the latest examples of this trend: Trump's Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a rule that would roll back anti-discrimination protections under the Affordable Care Act for transgender people or people who have previously undergone an abortion, and also finalized a rule to allow medical providers to refuse treatment and services for religious and moral reasons , which critics say could justify denial of service to trans people.

Coming on the heels of the transgender military ban, the proposed rule removes protections against gender-identity discrimination from the nondiscrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which bans sex discrimination in federally funded health care (after a final rule implemented in 2016 explicitly included gender identity). The new rule would strip civil rights protections in healthcare from an estimated 1.4 million transgender adults and 150,000 trans youth ages 13 to 17 in the US.

Denying some people equal treatment to satisfy religious liberty for others in a civil society is a ploy to advance an agenda that has nothing to do with morality or Christianity. It is rather about turning back the clock for women and LGBTQ people who do not conform to an antiquated or "traditional" vision of our nation.