“I could not think of a more dangerous person to head up the Office of Civil Rights at HHS,” JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president of policy and political affairs of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement.

He’s talking about Roger Severino, a distinguished Harvard law school graduate who spent seven years as a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights enforcing “the Fair Housing Act, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and Title II and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” as his official bio states.

Severino cut his teeth in public interest law defending the religious liberty of all Americans (regardless of their faith) at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He most recently served as director of the Devos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation.

He’s smart, decent, and well qualified. He will remember that religious liberty is not just an option; it’s a right actually guaranteed in our Constitution. And he will enforce civil rights for all.

Photo credit: American Life League via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0