Michael J. Stern

Opinion columnist

Last year, the Department of Justice announced the formation of a “religious liberty task force.” To most, a task force dedicated to ensuring the free exercise of religion must have sounded like a good thing. But having spent 25 years as an attorney for DOJ, I recognize a Trojan horse when I see one. I knew what the department’s seedling held in its belly.

In the lead-up to the formal creation of the religious liberty task force, DOJ was working hard to maintain President Donald Trump’s evangelical base. In September 2017, the Justice Department backed a Colorado baker’s claim that religious freedom allowed him to violate an anti-discrimination law that prohibited him from rejecting same-sex couples as customers of his wedding cake business.

The next month, DOJ published its “Principles of Religious Liberty.” These rules guide all federal prosecutions and declare that “except in the narrowest circumstances,” the Justice Department will side with a claim of religious liberty — even if it conflicts with laws prohibiting discrimination or securing the separation of church and state.

Protecting the liberty of Christians

Since then, the Justice Department has wasted no time furthering its efforts to promote “religious liberty.” When a Christian pregnancy center challenged a California law requiring notice to patients that state-funded services could be used to terminate a pregnancy, DOJ backed the Christian pregnancy center.

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In other cases, the Justice Department threw its weight behind: Christian students' efforts to force Maine to pay tuition for attendance at a private religious school; a Christian student who complained that a Georgia college was too restrictive on where he could evangelize on college property; and a Christian student group challenging the University of Iowa’s discipline for alleged discrimination against a gay student.

Though the Supreme Court punted on the substantive issues at stake in the wedding cake case, the high court handed DOJ a win on the pregnancy center when the president's conservative appointee, Neil Gorsuch, sided with DOJ in a 5-4 ruling.

While the Trump Justice Department has bent over backwards to protect the “religious liberty” of countless Christian organizations, its efforts have been less charitable to non-Christians. When a Native American tribe raised religious objections to a South Dakota pipeline that would infringe on sacred lands, DOJ offered no support.

And in a pivotal case pending before the Supreme Court, the Justice Department contradicted the Obama administration and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s position that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of LGBT status. The Justice Department has backed employers who want to fire their employees for being gay.

Since formation of the religious liberty task force, a pattern has emerged in which DOJ uses claims of religious liberty to further Trump administration political goals. Daniel Mach, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on freedom of religion and belief, aptly described the Trump Justice Department: "It supports an unfounded, unprecedented religious license to discriminate; and at the same (time), the administration is indifferent or outright hostile to faiths and religious individuals with which it disagrees."

Religious freedom for conservatives only

Perhaps the most complete illustration of Mach’s allegation is the Scott Warren case that ended in a hung jury this month. Warren provided food and water to two undocumented immigrants he found hiding in the bathroom of a barn used by a humanitarian group in the outskirts of a small Arizona town. The group is known to leave life-saving supplies in the desert borderlands, where people often die while crossing the border. Warren let the two immigrants stay in the barn for several days.

For this, the Justice Department charged Warren with crimes that carried penalties of up to 20 years in prison. When Warren defended his actions by asserting that his religion required him to help people in dire need, DOJ turned a blind eye. In a contest between the president’s hard-line immigration policies and a humanitarian’s actions intended to save lives, saving lives lost.

If the first year of DOJ’s religious liberty task force has taught us anything, it is that there is little more than pretext at the core of its policies on religious freedom. Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke, who assisted with Warren’s defense, cut to the heart of the matter: The Justice Department is interested in “only protecting the religious liberty rights of those who are religious conservatives.”

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As the Justice Department continues to deploy “religious liberty” to push the Trump political agenda, the challenge forDOJ will be what to do when a hotel owner relies on his religious beliefs to deny a room to a black couple. Or when a corporate CEO says the Bible portrays women as subservient and claims that his religious liberty is violated by anti-discrimination laws that force him to employ women.

Barricading the most vulnerable below deck

When cases like these rear their ugly heads, and they will, watch for the Justice Department to manufacture a legal fiction that exempts blacks and women from the wholesale surrender of civil rights that affect all minorities. Blacks and women have too much political power for DOJ to withstand the public outcry that would come with subordinating their liberty to a claim of religious freedom.

It’s the gays, Mexicans, Muslims and bathroom-swapping transgenders that religious conservatives still stand a chance of barricading below deck.

The most telling evidence of DOJ’s intent behind its “religious freedom” campaign will come when the barrel of religious liberty is aimed at its most strident supporters. What will DOJ do when the owner of the most trendy restaurant in Washington, D.C., asserts a life of biblical adherence as justification for his refusal to serve well-known adulterers in Congress or the White House? Or when a football player, who is fired for taking a knee, demands that DOJ sue the team owner for violating the player’s freedom of religious expression?

Before Trump co-opted the Department of Justice as a tool of the White House, it was considered a champion for victims of discrimination, not a shield for the discriminators. But that was another time. The Justice Department has morphed the right to freely observe the religion of one’s choice into a full-fledged right to discriminate. And with it, DOJ is actively killing decades of laws designed to protect minorities who continue to suffer popular subjugation.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: The Justice Department’s religious liberty policy is sugar in a child’s mouth at bedtime. The decay of civil rights will not come all at once, but it will surely come.

Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJStern1