National Review Online's Whelan Attacks DOJ For Assigning Gay Attorneys To Civil Rights Case

National Review Online blogger Ed Whelan attacked the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division for assigning two gay attorneys to the team of attorneys working on Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, a case in which the Supreme Court will address the extent to which religious organizations can engage in discrimination without running afoul of sex discrimination law.

In a blog post, Whelan quoted discredited research from Pajamas Media to attack one of the attorneys, Aaron Schuham, for his previous position with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an organization dedicated to preserving the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

But Whelan then went a step further, stating that Schuham has a “same-sex partner [who] is ... Chris Anders, federal policy director for the ACLU's LGBT Rights project.” Whelan further reported that another Justice Department attorney working on the case, Sharon McGowan, “was also a staffer on the ACLU's LGBT Rights project” and that she is married to a woman who is “the Family Equality Council's 'federal lobbyist on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender family issues.' ”

Whelan then used this information to spin a conspiracy theory about the Justice Department possibly using the discrimination case as a step in their agenda to “have gay causes trump religious liberty”:

Thus, insofar as personnel is policy,* it may well be that the Obama DOJ's hostility to the ministerial exemption in the Hosanna-Tabor case is part and parcel of a broader ideological agenda that would have gay causes trump religious liberty.

So, in Whelan's opinion, should all gay lawyers have been barred from working on a case that deals with the application of anti-discrimination laws to religious freedom, or just the ones who were previously gay-rights activists or have same-sex partners who are gay-rights activists? Or is it OK to assign gay lawyers to the case, but only if the Justice Department takes a position more to Whelan's liking? Whatever Whelan meant, it's a ridiculous argument.