The Biden-Becerra Budget: Equity Is In, Religious Freedom Is Out

On the Friday before Memorial Day, President Biden quietly released his budget for the fiscal year 2022,  clearly hoping people’s attention would be anywhere but on his plans for America. I am not here referring to the billions upon billions of wasteful spending he is proposing, but to something more pernicious — the rise of the “woke” budget and how it seeks to transform this country.

A word search of the president’s 33-page budget narrative reveals his administration’s priorities. It mentions “equity” and its variations 49 times, while a variant of the now passe’ term “equality” is mentioned just once, and probably by accident. Gobs of other intersectional buzzwords are layered throughout, with women/gender, race/racial, people of color, minority, black, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Native American, sexual orientation, and transgender/gender identity appearing a whopping 90 times combined.

Conspicuously missing from Biden’s equity list, however, is any mention of conscience or religious liberty. By contrast, the Trump administration’s budgets put these issues front and center, as they should be. (See Amend. I, U.S. Const.).