In the continued push to become a theocracy in which all praises are due to the most high Vice President Mike Pence’s god, Trump’s administration proposed a new rule Wednesday that would allow businesses receiving federal funding through contracts to discriminate against workers based on race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, and LGBTQ status.
According to BuzzFeed News, the move would bypass worker protections put in place by past presidents because Mike Pence is a Christian robot whose Bible has one page that reads “Hate everything that God doesn’t give a shit about.”
From BuzzFeed News:
The move marks President Donald Trump’s latest effort to weaken civil rights for minorities and satisfy his conservative Christian base with ambiguous rules that grant agencies wide discretion to let companies off the hook when accused of discrimination.
The 46-page draft rule from the Labor Department would apply to a range of so-called religious organizations — including corporations, schools, and societies — provided that they claim a “religious purpose.”
But the Trump administration makes clear in the draft rule that a corporation needn’t focus entirely on religion to qualify, saying, “The contractor must be organized for a religious purpose, meaning that it was conceived with a self-identified religious purpose. This need not be the contractor’s only purpose.”
“A religious purpose can be shown by articles of incorporation or other founding documents, but that is not the only type of evidence that can be used,” says the rule, which grants companies many opportunities to claim that faith or morals guide their purpose.
Labor Department spokesperson Megan Sweeney told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday that the rule would allow for-profit corporations with federal contracts to cite religious claims and therefore discriminate against workers.
The new rule could allow for “firing or refusing to hire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” the National Center for Transgender Equality said in a statement viewed by BuzzFeed News. “It could also lead to federal contractors refusing to hire women or unmarried workers who are pregnant or parents, or even discrimination on the basis of race.”
So the Trump administration, which is becoming the top presidency of talking out of both sides of their mouth, believes that the new rule wouldn’t change nondiscrimination orders but would allow for employers to expand the definition of religious beliefs and tenets, and therefore allow “religious organizations” to make “employment decisions consistent with their sincerely held religious tenets and beliefs without fear of sanction by the federal government.”
In short, the new rule allows for discrimination while claiming that the proposal “reaffirms employers’ obligations not to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or other protected bases and does not exempt or excuse a contractor from complying with any other requirements,” HuffPost reports.
The proposal could potentially affect 420,000 contractors—and get this shit, the Labor Department claims that workers terminated because of “religious differences” wouldn’t be able to sue, meaning the new rule wouldn’t cost taxpayers more money because the discrimination would be legal.
“As the agency put it, the rule ‘will reduce the risk of non-compliance to contractors and the potential costs of litigation such findings of non-compliance with OFCCP’s requirements might impose,’” wrote BuzzFeed News.
Just spoke with God’s receptionist, who noted that she was unavailable for comment, but the woman who answered the phone and wouldn’t give her name noted that God didn’t know Mike Pence like that and added, “I mean she knows him, but She wouldn’t buy him a drink if they were both at the club.”
Will update with God’s statement, should She call back.