WASHINGTON — The Justice Department this week hosted training for its lawyers on religious liberty laws as part of Attorney General William P. Barr’s push to prioritize religious freedom cases, but the workshops prompted concern among some career lawyers that they were being educated on ways to blunt civil rights protections for gay and transgender people.
Lawyers who worked at the Justice Department during the past three administrations could not recall a similar week of training sessions on any topic.
The training week was part of an ongoing campaign at the department to bolster its work to protect religious freedom, which is regularly described by top leaders as the first right protected by the First Amendment, a department official said in response to a request for comment.
In an email to employees sent on behalf of department leaders last weekend about the training, the department said that its leaders were proud of the work “done over the past year to promote religious freedom,” including prosecutions related to land use, education and employment.
Last month, the department filed a statement of interest in federal court in Kentucky that supported the right of a photographer not to work at same-sex weddings; she said it would violate her religious beliefs. And last fall the Justice Department supported an appeals case in Maine, saying that a state law banning religious schools from the state’s school tuition program was unconstitutional.
Both filings were a departure from the department’s positions under the Obama administration and have drawn criticism from gay rights activists as well as supporters of a sharp separation between church and state.
The training, the first of its kind, was voluntary. It was meant to improve employees’ understanding of their own free exercise of religious rights in the workplace, as well as the department’s resources for protecting places of worship and individual religious rights, according to the department official.
But career lawyers said that they feared the department was working to further the use of religious freedom in ways that would push back efforts to protect gay and transgender people from discrimination, according to emails and messages reviewed by The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/politics/justice-department-religious-freedom.html