Posted by:
Alpiner
(
)
Date: November 15, 2015 07:56PM
What a horribly atrocious idea.
So some government committee gets to decide which ideas are 'approved'? Do you realize how slippery of a slope this is?
Whenever somebody comes up with an idea as badly thought out as this one, I try to introduce a thought exercise. It goes like this:
First, imagine the solution you're proposing. The Mormon church is bigoted (as determined by fiat). Ergo, its members should not be eligible for government employ. Brilliant! We've stamped out some small element of bigotry.
Now, imagine that your worst ideological opponents have their hands on the levers of power. Anti-Semitism is on the rise (for examples, see here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/02/college-anti-israel-divestment_n_6784650.html). Are you a Jew that identifies with Israel? Well, maybe you shouldn't have a job with the government either. And, hey, the Qu'ran is pretty anti-homosexual too, so we should probably keep any Muslims from government service.
As part of your newfound effort to categorize people by religion, you make a database of people, sorted by religion, for all federal and state organizations to use, otherwise how will we know who to discriminate against? Given the generally shitty job the government does with IT, of course it gets hacked, and of course it gets leaked. Meanwhile, various people on the left and right are trying to tell you that categorizing people by religion is generally a bad idea, but you ignore them (and wide swaths of history) because, dammit, the Mormons don't deserve government jobs.
This is a bewilderingly bad idea. You should feel bad for proposing it and even worse for defending it, as it's essentially bigotry personified. You may think you're better than Mormons, but at least they are not defending kicking homosexuals out of government service (witness, for example, Oaks excoriating Kim Davis for breaking the law) or creating a religious litmus test for government employ.