Biden Admin Creating Alarming List of Religious Americans Rejecting Vaccine Mandates
The Biden administration is compiling a list of workers at a little-known federal agency who have applied for religious vaccine exemptions in what a conservative think tank is warning could be a test run for such data collection on a broader scale.
The Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia quietly issued a notice on Tuesday announcing the establishment of the “Employee Religious Exception Request Information System,” which “maintains personal religious information collected in response to religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement.”
The notice was reported by The Daily Signal, a news and commentary website of the think tank The Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation fellows Sarah Parshall Perry and GianCarlo Canaparo suggested that the PSA was picked because the implementation of such a system at the tiny agency was unlikely to attract a lot of attention for a system the Biden administration actually plans to expand across the rest of the federal government.
And in a follow-up post, they drove the point home, reporting that other federal agencies are taking similar action.
In the Tuesday piece, the authors noted that there is not much by way of explanation as to the purpose of the PSA’s new system offered in the announcement.
It merely says that “the primary purpose of the secured electronic file repository is to collect, maintain, use, and — to the extent appropriate and necessary — disseminate employee religious exception request information collected by the Agency” as part of its efforts to meet the federal vaccine requirement.
“PSA will use the information in processing religious accommodation requests and to determine the appropriate health and safety protocols for employees in the context of the federally mandated COVID-19 vaccination. The secured electronic file repository enables PSA to log, track, and manage employee religious exception request information,” it adds.
“In other words, the list will help the agency make a list,” Perry and Canaparo noted.
There is also no indication as to what will happen to the information collected in the database after an employee’s religious accommodations request has been processed and decided.
The information may include “religious accommodation requests, including Request for a Religious Exception to the COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement form, notes, religious affiliation, or records made during consideration of requests, and decisions on requests,” the announcement reads.
Also lacking is any explanation as to “why the Biden administration chose to test this policy in an agency with a majority-black staff, who are both more religious and less vaccinated than other groups,” Perry and Canaparo wrote.
“So much for the president’s commitment to ‘racial equity.’”
Indeed. In spite of our nation’s collective memory of the horrors of the Tuskegee syphilis study, the Biden administration appears to be testing an Orwellian database of religious exemptions requests on an agency staffed by mostly black employees, and it’s flying right under the radar because it’s the little Pretrial Services Agency.
“With the Pretrial Services Agency, Biden likely expected that the policy would land quickly and without a splash. As it is, the notice of a new announcement provides less than 30 days for public comment,” Perry and Canaparo noted.
“Biden may not be winning points for transparency, but he’s doing his best to win first place in subjecting Americans with sincerely held religious beliefs to differential treatment,” they added.
It’s very difficult not to gather the distinct impression that this database is targeted at the small but steadfast minority of Americans who have evidenced sincere religious objections to the vaccine.
After all, what service could it possibly provide to the federal government, the people of the District of Columbia or taxpayers as a whole to compile these lists?
What has become clear since Perry and Canaparo published their original pieces is that similar measures are underway at other agencies in the Biden administration.
In a piece published Saturday, the Heritage Foundation fellows wrote:
“A little digging at the Federal Register revealed that there are at least 19 total federal agencies — including five cabinet level agencies — that have created or proposed to create these tracking lists for religious-exemption requests from their employees.
“The list includes the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of the Treasury, to name only a few.
“As the nation’s largest employer, with over four million civilian and military employees, the federal government has received tens of thousands of religious exemption requests. It now appears that an increasing number of federal agencies are keeping and preserving those individuals’ names, religious information, personally identifying information, and other data stored in lists across multiple government agencies.
“Why?” Perry and Canaparo asked.
That is the question.
Why does the Biden administration think it’s necessary and acceptable for the federal to compile such information on its own citizens?
Why is it that so many pandemic-related policies appear so similar to those of totalitarian regimes from the pages of dystopian novels and history books alike?
We have major U.S. cities checking people’s papers as they navigate daily life, a federal government intent on coercing as many private and public servants into vaccination as it can legally get away with, and now the inception of government databases of federal employees who are simply asking for the right to obey their conscience rather than man.
How can we still be expected to ignore this troubling pattern at this point?
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