More Political Pandering at the Department of Justice

I have been blogging off and on for 2 years now about Eric Holders performance as Attorney General and I have been calling for him to resign, get fired, go on permanent leave, catch a cold, get a wart or something –anything to get him out of office. Now we have his leadership responsible for our Justice Department deciding to sue a local school district for denying a Muslim math teacher 19 days off to go on the Hajj (or religious pilgrimage to Mecca). Let me give you some quick background before you think I am against Muslims or something. This teacher is new and still on probation. She had the nerve to ask for these 19 days while still on probation and in the middle of the term, leaving the students without a teacher (which would mean a series of substitutes and the resulting interruption and confusion in their education).

OK, try to understand. take the words 'religion' and 'Muslim' out of this. Imagine if you were just starting a new job which involved your being responsible for training 30 people for a year and you decided to ask your new employer for 19 days off before you've even earned the right for a single vacation day. You'd be laughed out of the office.

Our Department of Justice does not see this as just an example of a gutsy employee asking for accommodations they do not deserve, they see it as religious bigotry against Muslims. Don’t believe me? Assistant attorney general for Civil Rights Thomas Perez said the division was pursuing the case in order to address “a real head wind of intolerance against Muslim communities,” and protect “the religious liberty that our forefathers came to this country for.”

The school district denied any such bigotry, explaining that its refusal to accommodate her request was purely due to the extended time period and the fact that the time she requested would have resulted in undue hardship for her students. “The school district just wanted a teacher in the room for those three weeks,” said the town’s former mayor Michael A. Esposito. “They didn’t care if she was a Martian, a Muslim, or a Catholic.”

Fortunately, not everyone in the Government is as politically motivated as our Attorney General. Todd Gaziano, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said that Perez’s statement about the district having an anti-Muslim bias was troubling. “The suit can only serve that purpose if the school board’s action was motivated by intolerance against Muslims, but DOJ has provided no evidence of that,” Gaziano said. “To publicly defame school board officials as religious bigots without any evidence is a serious abuse and leads credence to the allegation that DOJ’s suit was brought merely to pander to a particular political constituency.”

If there is one Department in the United States Government that should never be influenced by political pandering, it is the Department of Justice. Hey, Mr. Holder, there is a reason that lady in the statue holding the scales is wearing a blind fold! Or didn’t they teach you that in law school? The responsibility for the way the DOJ does things rests squarely on the shoulders of it leadership –and that is Eric Holder. The leadership he has shown is bias, bigoted and politically motivated. He needs to go –and now!

Live Long and Prosper....