Today’s Must Read

We know what the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department hasn’t been doing under the Bush administration: protecting African-American voters from discrimination. And much of our coverage at TPM has tended to focus on the division’s voting rights section, and the voter suppression efforts of two figures in particular, Bradley Schlozman and Hans von Spakovsky.

Add that to charges of racial discrimination by employees of the section, the section’s failure to bring only a couple suits on behalf of African-American voters over the past several years (while bringing the first ever Voting Rights Act suit alleging discrimination against white voters), and Schlozman’s and von Spakovsky’s efforts to intimidate career employees who didn’t toe the line, and you’ve painted a pretty dim view of the Civil Rights Division.

But as The New York Times detailed yesterday, where the political appointees defanged the division’s efforts on behalf of African-Americans, it shifted resources to causes near and dear to conservatives, like religious discrimination and human trafficking cases. They are the sorts of cases, the Times reports, that the new hires in the Civil Rights Division — generally very conservative lawyers who were dubbed by some career lawyers as “holy hires” — prosecuted with zeal.

Here’s the Times’ blow-by-blow rundown of the shift, which began under John Ashcroft’s tenure, but accelerated under Gonzales:

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

¶Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

¶Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.

About that “candy cane” case:

In the candy cane case, for example, school officials in Westfield, Mass., had suspended students for handing out candy canes with religious messages, saying it was disruptive and lurid. The students said that the “J” shape represented Jesus and the red stripes his blood, the white his purity.