Published June 2, 2022
As Americans are threatened by rising crime, the Biden administration is focused on putting men in women’s prisons and pushing Christians and political dissenters from transgender ideology out of law enforcement.
President Biden has released his long-delayed executive order on law enforcement, and it does not include the bombshell proposal to put men in women’s prisons that I reported on back in January. Unfortunately, this cut is not because the Biden administration thought better of the idea, but because it already quietly rewrote the Bureau of Prisons manual to allow men in women’s prisons.
The change in federal prison policy was pushed out in January shortly after I wrote about the draft executive order. Almost no one noticed, myself included. There was limited media attention in pro-transgender outlets, and I missed it at first because I was looking for the executive order, not monitoring federal prison policy changes or LGBT propaganda. Mea culpa. I guess Biden was in such a hurry to put men into women’s prisons that he couldn’t wait until his executive order came out.
Meanwhile, the just-issued executive order is a cornucopia of bad ideas, including policies that are meant to drive Biden’s ideological enemies, especially conservative Christians, out of law enforcement. Thus, Biden has ordered the government to create and implement plans for hiring and retaining federal law enforcement officers that include “vetting mechanisms and ongoing employment screening, that … help avoid the hiring and retention of law enforcement officers who promote … bias against persons based on … sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Targeting Political Dissenters
Of course, the ideologues running the Biden administration believe that any disagreement with the latest demands of the rainbow agenda by definition promotes bias against persons based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Thus, they are going to target conservative Christians and other dissenters from the reigning sexual and gender ideology.
In short, orthodox evangelicals, actual devout Catholics, and even radical feminist lesbians who believe real women don’t have penises need not apply. And those who are already employed had better keep their mouths shut, including in their private lives, or else start updating their resumes. As far as the Biden administration is concerned, anyone who finds the term “female penis” incongruous, or doubts that toddlers can really be transgender, is a bigot with no place in law enforcement.
The order does specify that this policy be “consistent with the First Amendment,” a football field-sized red flag that the administration plans to violate it. Government lawyers talking about how they’re going to respect a constitutional right is a sign they’re planning to ignore it, presumably with a half-baked theory about how it doesn’t apply in this case.
The administration is going to violate the First Amendment with gusto until someone sues and wins, which may take years. In the meantime, federal law enforcement will have been further conquered by the woke left.
Forcing Woke Ideology on Local Police
Nor will these policies be confined to the federal government. The order specifies that the same rules be implemented “for State, Tribal, local, and territorial law enforcement participation in programs or activities over which Federal agencies exercise control, such as joint task forces or international training and technical assistance programs, including programs managed by the Department of State and the Department of Justice.”
The government is also ordered to provide “guidance” to “State, Tribal, local, and territorial” law enforcement on these subjects. The goal is to take over all American law enforcement and fill it with leftist ideology on race, sex, and gender.
Every federal law enforcement officer is going to be subject to “an evidence-informed training module for law enforcement officers on implicit bias and avoiding improper profiling based on the actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, limited English proficiency, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), or disability of individuals.”
Biden’s demand for “evidence-based” implicit bias training is, strictly speaking, an impossible order, because, as we have known for years, the whole framework of implicit bias is junk science. The attempt to measure unconscious bias and then determine its effects on discriminatory behavior is a psychological and statistical mess.
The idea of implicit bias really functions as a substitute theological explanation of evil for people who do not believe in original sin. Thus, making implicit bias training an annual part of law enforcement training is just another opportunity for ideological indoctrination — and a chance to provide more handouts to the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry.
Pushing Out Good Officers
Much of the same is true of the order to establish procedures for “receiving, investigating, and responding meaningfully to complaints alleging improper profiling or bias by Federal law enforcement officers.” This will be another ideological cudgel with which to beat non-leftists out of the force—“You’re a good investigator, Hudson, but you’ve misgendered one too many kiddy porn suspects.”
Of course, this will also be pushed onto state and local law enforcement. Per the order:
Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall promptly review and exercise their authority, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to award Federal discretionary grants in a manner that supports and promotes the adoption of policies of this order by State, Tribal, local, and territorial governments and LEAs. The Attorney General, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall also use other incentives outside of grantmaking, such as training and technical assistance, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to support State, Tribal, local, and territorial governments and LEAs in adopting the policies in this order.
Federal funds are soon going to come with strings requiring cops to think and speak like the denizens of race and gender studies departments. A lot of good cops are going to be pushed out over this, but at least criminals will be referred to by their preferred pronouns.
Nathanael Blake, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His primary research interests are American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has focused on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre and Russell Kirk. He is currently working on a study of J.R.R. Tolkien’s anti-rationalism. He writes from Virginia.
Image: Rennett Stowe, Flickr
Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His primary research interests are American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien. He is currently working on a study of Kierkegaard and labor. As a cultural observer and commentator, he is also fascinated at how our secularizing culture develops substitutes for the loss of religious symbols, meaning and order.