States Biden Won in 2020 Lead — in Religious Discrimination Complaints

Liberalism, it is claimed, is associated with tolerance. But you wouldn’t know it from a new study finding that of the 10 states with the most religious-discrimination complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), eight gave their electoral votes to Joe Biden in 2020.

Not surprisingly, there’s a secularism connection, too: Of the 15 states with the most religious discrimination complaints, 11 are among the 15 most atheistic states. A prime example is Maine, which ranks one in religious-discrimination complaints and two in non-religious-population percentage.

The research was conducted by employment law experts at Duddy, Goodwin & Pollard (DGP), who examined EEOC data to find out which states lead in religious discrimination charges (note: DGP did not examine the atheism connection). “They gathered the total number of discrimination charges and religious discrimination charges occurring from 2009 to 2022 to calculate the percentage of religious discrimination in each state,” a representative wrote in an email.

As DGP relates:

Maine is at the top of the list, making it the state with the highest rate of religious discrimination claims in all of America. The state experienced 505 discrimination charges overall, with 15.45% of these being religious discrimination charges.

Massachusetts is in second place for the highest percentage of religious discrimination. Massachusetts saw 6,630 discrimination charges in total, and 969 of these were religious charges. This equates to 14.62% of all discrimination charges being religious discrimination.

Rhode Island has the third highest religious discrimination rate in America. The state reported 940 instances of discrimination in total; 12.55% of these are religious discrimination charges — that’s 118 cases of religious discrimination from 2009 to 2022.

Washington comes next, with the fourth highest rate of religious discrimination charges. Washington experienced 17,605 total discrimination charges from 2009 to 2022 — 1,993 of these were religious, which is equal to 11.32%.

In fifth place is Oregon, with 3,541 discrimination charges in total. Religious discrimination accounts for 362 of these, which is 10.22% of all charges.

Note that in all the above states the Democratic Party controls “the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature,” relates website BallotPedia. In other words, each one is a left-wing, one-party state.

Below is the list of the DGP’s top 10.

And what states ranked best? “Interestingly, Mississippi has the lowest rate of religious discrimination in America,” DGP also informs. “In Mississippi, a total of 22,815 discrimination charges were made, and only 592, or 2.59%, of these were religious.”

In fact, all of the bottom four religious-discrimination-complaint spots are occupied by Bible Belt states (i.e., Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas). And all of the bottom 10 are Republican states, with nine having supported President Trump in the 2020 election; the exception is Georgia, where the Biden victory was highly suspect (and the GOP completely controls Georgia’s state government).

In fairness, the DGP study does have an apparent defect: Since it ranks states based on the percentage that religious-discrimination complaints are of total discrimination complaints, a state could, for example, rank low in the former merely because it has an inordinately large number of the latter. A better measure is the percentage of religious-discrimination complaints relative to states’ populations.

For instance, Minnesota ranks nine on the religious-discrimination list and Colorado 10 even though the latter has substantially more complaints (1,877 vs. 1,068). So Minnesota actually appears to be doing far better, considering that the two states have roughly the same population (Minnesota, 5,761,530; Colorado, 5,890,000).

Another issue is the lack of data on the religious complaints’ nature. To what extent is today’s fashionable Christophobia at issue and to what degree are these politically correct complaints (e.g., allegations of anti-Muslim bias)? And how does this vary state by state? For example, one might expect more anti-Christian discrimination in highly atheistic Washington than in more faith-oriented Utah.

Speaking of which, there is a significant, though not perfect, correlation between a state’s DGP religious-discrimination-complaint ranking and its percentage of non-religious citizens (the latter based on WorldAtlas data). To wit:

The states shared by both the DGP religious-discrimination list and the irreligiosity list amount to seven of the top 10, 11 of the top 15, and 15 of the top 20. This may be explained by a 2017 study showing that, as PsyPost reported, the “nonreligious can be more close-minded than the religious.”

All this said, it should be pointed out that the agency providing this data, the EEOC, is an unconstitutional entity that tramples freedom of association based on a skewed conception of religious rights. The Constitution constrains “Congress” from making a “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”; and “Congress,” of course, does not include privately owned businesses. Yet the latter are precisely what the EEOC spends most of its time suing, enabled by an activist Supreme Court opinion that labeled private establishments “public accommodations.”

Quite notoriously, the EEOC sued on behalf of a hijab-wearing Muslim woman who filed a 2008 complaint after Abercrombie & Fitch refused to hire her because it prohibited employee head coverings. Of course, why a property owner should lose his freedom of association because he decides to sell clothing — or food, cars, wedding services, or anything else — is never adequately explained.

What does this have to do with this article’s subject? It puts religious-discrimination complaints in perspective: They may often make for a court case, but not always for an injustice.