For Shea and her sympathizers, since religious freedom can only be understood by Americans with “mainstream” beliefs, it can only be extended to Americans with those same beliefs. Even American Muslims who present themselves as moderates should have their motives questioned and their records examined. According to the suit, Ms. Shea wrote in an email that Ms. Ghori-Ahmad’s profession of tolerance could be dismissed as a sham because it would have been “really stupid” for her to have revealed what Shea believed must be her real views. Islam, in Shea’s mind, equals intolerance, and she was personally committed to exposing this alleged Muslim hypocrisy abroad.

This is not religious freedom. This is a toxic combination of Christian supremacy and flagrant bias against Islam. In this view, “religious freedom” is anything but a pluralist mission to make the world safe for different ways to be religious; it means, rather, a mission to protect American majority religious interests from perceived threats from minority religious traditions.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finished its investigation of Ghori-Ahmad’s case in March 2010, and in May 2010 issued an Acknowledgement and Order according to which both Ghori-Ahmad and USCIRF were allowed to “obtain certain discovery from each other.”

But according to the complaint USCIRF refused to produce documents and denied access to the commissioners involved in rescinding Ghori-Ahman’s offer for a permanent job. She then requested a hearing before an administrative judge, who dismissed the case. According to the suit, “USCIRF—an entity created by Congress to promote religious freedom—argued that it could discriminate against employees without sanction because it was not subject to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The judge agreed. But subsequent legal reforms sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (H.R. 2867) made USCIRF subject to the Civil Rights Act. In June 2012 Ghori-Ahmad filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, alleging that USCIRF had illegally discriminated in hiring on the basis of religion. The suit has been wending its way through complex procedural hurdles; at this moment, it appears that the suit will proceed to trial.

Some within USCIRF have been appalled by the treatment of Ahmad. Bridget Kustin, a former USCIRF researcher, resigned in protest. Knox Thames, the commission’s policy and research director, is quoted in the suit as admitting that Ghori-Ahmad’s offer had been retracted because “certain Commissioners objected to her Muslim faith and affiliation . . . He said he was sorry this had happened.” Tom Carter, former communications director for the Commission, told The Daily Beast that, “the Durbin reforms give USCIRF a do-over. Hopefully, the new commissioners will take the opportunity to get it right this time.”

But will they? And, more fundamentally, what it would it mean to “get it right?” The USCIRF needs more than an overhaul. Simply broadening the commission’s mandate to clarify that it must protect Muslims or other disfavored minority religions isn’t sufficient. Government promotion of religious freedom is, by its very nature, a fundamentally flawed enterprise, because it inevitably becomes involved in deciding which religions, and which forms of which religions, are deserving of protection. Any government position on which religions to protect is necessarily tangled in that government’s political commitments, interests, and biases.

Some will counter that the USCIRF can simply be fixed by appointing “better” commissioners. After all, none of the commissioners identified in the lawsuit is still serving. Perhaps future Muslim-American job candidates will not be required to write an essay to prove that they are “objective and unbiased,” as was asked of Ahmad. But who will determine who the “right” person is, politically and religiously? Simply asking the question reveals the project’s fatal flaw: no commissioner selected by politicians can possibly stand above religious politics. No governmental officer—no government, period —should be taking on the role of religious arbiter, at home or abroad. A commission that promotes “religious freedom” may be nearly impossible to oppose—and yet it is an inevitably Orwellian project.

Ghori-Ahmad and USCIRF may reach a settlement. If not, this trial will surely become, as Christianity Today describes it, “one of the most ironic in American history, with the congressional commission charged with monitoring religious freedom around the world defending its own employment practices in court.”

Meanwhile, the rest of us must not lose sight of the bigger questions. A Department of Religious Freedom inevitably takes an official position on religion—and is therefore a contradiction in terms. It’s time to decommission the commission.

The article first appeared at The Boston Review

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