Will they outlaw evangelism next? (7/94)
    The following is from Christian Crusade Newspaper, P.O. Box 977, 
    Tulsa, OK 74102, in its 42nd year of publication. We can
    be E-mailed on America On Line as Christcrew, on Compuserve 
    at 72204,541, and via the Internet as Christcrew@aol.com .

by Keith Wilkerson, editor
       What if they made a law against witnessing about Jesus?
       What if some faceless bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., made it a 
crime to share your faith with people at work?
       What if some pencil pusher elected by nobody wrote a federal 
regulation that could get you fired for wearing a cross at work?
       Believe it or not, somebody within the Clinton Administration 
tried. It almost became a federal regulation on June 13.
       Only because astonished and horrified Christians besieged 
Washington, D.C. with telephone calls and letters did elected 
lawmakers call for a Congressional investigation.
       The new regulation against giving your Christian testimony on the 
job had been written quietly and without publicity by the Equal 
Employment Opportunity Commission. 
       Somebody tipped off former Nixon aide Charles Colson, now the 
head of Prison Fellowship International. He checked into it, found the 
rumor to be true, and alerted the leaders of some of America's largest 
religious groups.
       As a result, the U.S. Senate voted 94-0 to ask the Clinton 
Administration to shelve the new rules -- which the bureaucrats 
claimed would end "religious harassment."
       Unfortunately, the Senate's unanimous request does not have the 
force of law. The Clinton Administration may go ahead anyway -- 
contrary to the wishes of elected lawmakers. 
       "I fear that the overall impact of the proposed guidelines will be to 
create a workplace in which religious freedom is stifled and employers 
are put into an untenable position,'' said Sen. Howell Heflin, D-Ala., on 
the floor of the Senate.
       Lawyers for the Clinton Administration's Equal Employment 
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) tried to downplay concerns. They 
said that Senators and 90,000 letter-writers and concerned callers were 
all over-reacting to the proposed rules. The new rules would protect 
us all from religious nuts, not end freedom of religion, the lawyers 
complained. 
       However, nobody seemed to think their new regulations were a 
good idea -- except for the American Atheists and a Jewish group.
       In testimony before the U.S. Senate, "Can the EEOC guarantee 
that the communication of the Christian gospel will never, under any 
circumstances, be deemed to be actionable harassment?'' asked 
Michael K. Whitehead, the general counsel for the Southern Baptist 
Convention's Christian Life Commission. 
       "Southern Baptists and other religious groups can never support 
ambiguous and elastic standards which would permit an exercise of 
bureaucratic power over a person in the workplace who merely 
shares his faith.''
       Dudley Rochelle, an Atlanta labor lawyer who represents 
employers, said that if the new rules are adopted, she would have to 
advise bosses and supervisors to ban all religion at work. That would 
mean no witnessing, no conversation about Jesus, and not even 
Christian calendars on the wall. 
       She said the rules require "a workplace to be completely free of 
religious expression." All Bibles would have to be removed from 
desks, all religious magazines would have to be hidden from view, and 
no discussion of faith could take place on the job.
       Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, noted that the EEOC 
rules could result in "situations where an employer with a Bible on his 
desk might make a Muslim secretary uncomfortable and have 
something like that lead to a lawsuit.''
       Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Constitutional law professor 
Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas at Austin noted the tens of 
thousands of letters that the EEOC had received "from people who 
fear that the religious harassment guidelines will be used to suppress 
all religious speech in the workplace." Senate hearings "lent credence 
to the worst fears of the commission's critics," wrote Professor 
Laycock. "The American Atheists claim that the only way to end 
religious harassment is to create a 'religion-free' workplace, in which 
employees would be forbidden to keep religious art, calendars or 
books in their workplace, forbidden to hum or whistle religious 
songs, forbidden to engage in religious conversations, and forbidden to 
wear crosses, yarmulkes, or other religious clothing.
       "Already, Delta Airlines has actually tried to create a religion-free 
workplace, directing that its employees 'should not possess or display, 
in any manner, on company premises any material which may be 
construed, by anyone, to have racial, religious, or sexual overtones, 
whether positive or negative,'" noted the professor.
       Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., noted that the rules could 
lead employers to bar all religious expression in the workplace, 
violating our freedom of religion. "Under the EEOC's proposed 
guidelines, an employee who wears a cross, Star of David or other 
religious symbol, or who keeps a Bible on a desk could be accused of 
religious harassment," he said.
       The new rules could make it risky for employers to even mention 
their religious beliefs for fear of being charged with harassing 
workers who might disagree, noted the Birmingham, Alabama Post-
Herald's Washington correspondent Thomas Hargrove, writing for the 
Scripps-Howard news service. 
       "The EEOC guidelines were supported by the American Jewish 
Congress," he observed, "which said that Jews historically have been 
subjected to a variety of subtle and overt harassments on the job."
       Hargrove quoted Ohio Democratic Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, 
who is Jewish, as telling supporters of the Senate bill. 
       "'I am having difficulty in understanding just what it is you find 
objectionable. A broad brush has been used.'
       "But," according to Hargrove, "Metzenbaum dropped his 
opposition after he convinced Sens. Heflin and Hank Brown, R-Colo., 
to remove language from their bill that insisted that religious 
harassment must be considered separately from other kinds of 
harassment.
       "This is not an area that the EEOC has had guidelines on before,'' 
Sen. Brown said during the hour-long debate on the floor of the 
Senate. He expressed concern over placing religion into the same 
emotional powder keg that has developed over workplace sexual 
harassment. "To equate a picture of Moses, or Martin Luther King, or 
Christ with a pornographic picture is absurd.''
       Sen. Heflin said employer groups had expressed fear that the 
guidelines would open businesses to an entirely new kind of threat 
from civil lawsuits.
       "These guidelines, as worded, will create a tremendous burden for 
employers who would be forced to make policies in anticipation of 
employee reaction to almost every manifestation of religious belief,'' 
he said.
       Attorneys for the EEOC told the Reuters News Service that 
although the guidelines would be revised, the matter is far from 
settled.
       "Given the amount of controversy generated by this provision, it 
is clear that the language should be revised to more accurately reflect 
the intended meaning," Elizabeth Thornton, acting legal counsel for 
the EEOC, told the Senate Judiciary courts subcommittee, which is 
chaired by Heflin. 
       "There is the need to do some clarification," she said. 
       However, just revising the rules will not be enough, said 21 
Republican senators. In a letter to the EEOC, they asked that the 
reference to religion be deleted altogether, not merely revised. 
       Professor Laycock suggested that the matter could be handled 
very easily -- if that was the desire of the Clinton Administration.
       As proposed, the EEOC "forbid any speech or conduct that 
'denigrates' or shows 'aversion' to any religion and creates an 
'offensive environment' or 'otherwise adversely affects' any 
employee," wrote the professor. "The provisions are to be interpreted 
from the perspective of a reasonable person. But people of sharply 
different religious views have equally different ideas about what is 
offensive.
       "The guidelines do not distinguish expressions of religious faith 
and disagreement about religious issues, which are constitutionally 
protected, from personal attacks on other employees or persistent 
harangues directed at an unwilling audience, which are not. The 
vagueness of the guidelines invites large numbers of unjustified 
charges, and the prospect of litigation over such charges encourages 
employers to overreact and suppress all religious speech in the 
workplace.
       "It is not hard to state much more precisely what speech is 
harassment and what speech is protected." 
       Here are six clarifications that the professor said could eliminate 
much of the confusion caused by EEOC's rules:
       "1. It is illegal to demand that an employee engage in or refrain 
from religious behavior. Attending church or joining your supervisor 
in prayer cannot be made a condition of employment, promotion, 
raises, or other job benefits.
       "2. Slurs, epithets, and negative stereotypes about the personal 
characteristics of a religious group are generally illegal.
       "3. Persistent evangelism directed at the same individual, 
continued after a clear request to end the conversation or not bring 
the subject up again, may generally be treated as illegal religious 
harassment. The speaker has a clear right to evangelize, and the target 
has a clear right to end the conversation.
       "4. Affirmative expression of one's own religious faith or lack 
thereof, not targeted at a particular individual, cannot be religious 
harassment. Employees are free to wear religious clothing or jewelry, 
hang religious calendars or art in their personal workspace, and refer 
to their faith in ordinary conversation.
       "5. Serious argument for or against a religious or political 
proposition cannot be religious harassment -- or any other kind of 
harassment. This is true even if the argument rejects someone else's 
religious teachings, even if the argument is made in forceful, colorful 
or inarticulate terms, even if some co-workers find the speaker's 
position offensive. Religious and political argument is speech of the 
highest first amendment value. It would be a great improvement in 
the harassment guidelines if this flap over religious harassment 
resulted in a general clarification that serious argument is not 
harassment.
       "6. Even with these substantive clarifications, the commission 
should eliminate the multiple and overlapping generalities used in the 
guidelines."
       However, it is yet to be seen if anyone at EEOC is interested in 
being so clear. Such simple solutions were shrugged off by EEOC 
attorneys at the Senate hearings.
       "At last week's Senate hearings, there was remarkable agreement 
on what is protected speech and what is religious harassment," wrote 
the professor. "This agreement spanned the political spectrum, from 
the American Civil Liberties Union to the Southern Baptist 
Convention.
       "What remains to be seen is whether the commission will state 
these principles in plain language. 
       "Or will it persist in vague generalities that unnecessarily 
intimidate workers and employers and leave all the real answers to be 
worked out in the courts through expensive litigation?"
       America will have to wait and see.

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