Colorado lawmakers’ $1,000 internship comes with a religion and ancestry test

By Wayne Laugesen | Commentary, Wayne’s Word

Imagine a sharp kid from Aurora. She has straight A’s, a weekend job, and dreams of public service. Her parents came from Mexico. She’s Catholic. She finds a flyer announcing a paid internship at the state Capitol and reads the first requirement. She cries after learning that her genetics, religion, and ethnic background are a problem.

She does not qualify. Not because of her grades, but for identity traits she did not ask for and cannot change. In the United States, we don’t limit opportunities based on family trees. Doing so would be 100% antithetical to the values of a country that won a civil war and passed a federal civil rights act.

To turn away a young woman because she’s of Mexican descent would be a crime. Two Colorado legislators just committed that crime boldly and for all to see — as if they are immune from American and Colorado law. Colorado’s mainstream media hasn’t acknowledge this disgrace.

What the flyer says

State Sen. Iman Jodeh (a Muslim) and state Rep. Yara Zokaie (Iranian) seek applicants for a paid internship program for the upcoming session to work for their MENASA & Muslim Joint Legislative Caucus. The first qualification: “Identify as a Muslim and/or as Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian.” It pays a $1,000 stipend and places interns in their public offices. One can apply for the opportunity through an official state email.¹

In 2023, Jodeh announced the “second annual Arab or Muslim Legislative Internship”²program with the same prejudicial identity qualifiers. Jodeh and Zokaie founded the caucus in 2024, promising to fight xenophobia and discrimination,³ ironically the exact atrocities they committed with this illegal ad.

Jodeh represents Senate District 29, an Aurora district in Arapahoe County on the east side of the Denver metro area.⁴ Zokaie, who identifies as “Iranian,” represents House District 52 in Fort Collins.⁵ Both jurisdictions contain constituents of all religious beliefs and people who hail from every square mile of the planet.

Never mind those facts, because the pair have created an opportunity available only to young adults with parents and grandparents from the right part of the world. Everyone else is out. That is a religious and ethnic test for a government job. When government sorts people by ancestry the word is racism.

It’s against the law

A lawmaker’s personal staff, prospective or current, is not exempt from civil rights protections. The Government Employee Rights Act of 1991 requires that hiring for the personal staff of state elected officials be “free from any discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”⁶ Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already bars employers from refusing to hire anyone because of religion or national origin.⁷

The Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act bans job discrimination based on religion, national origin, and ancestry. State-funded employment gets no exemption.⁸ In fact, the law should hold state-funded employers, who control other people’s money, to the highest standards of fairness and decency.

Our state constitution states that no person may be denied “any civil or political right, privilege or capacity, on account of his opinions concerning religion,” and no “preference” may be “given by law to any religious denomination.”⁹ Because government is doing the sorting, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause also forbids this bigotry.

Jodeh and Zokaie are free to champion their communities. They are not free to use taxpayer money and a state email account to hang a superior race “Members Only” sign on the Capitol door.

We settled this long ago

Americans have evolved to recoil at bigotry. In 1790, George Washington promised a Jewish congregation that American governance “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”¹⁰ The Constitution says “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”¹¹

Generations of Americans fought to make that promise real for everyone: Irish Catholics told they “need not apply,” Jews shut out of clubs and colleges, Black Americans locked out of nearly everything. The civil rights movement won on a simple idea. You don’t judge a people by skin pigmentation, religious affiliation, or the country their grandparents left. Nothing screams “un-American” like politicians disqualifying or otherwise discriminating on a basis of demographic identity.

Where this test is the rule

Government jobs with faith requirements do exist. In theocracies.

Iran’s constitution makes Twelver Shi’ism the state’s permanent, official religion; it grants limitless authority to divinely appointed, infallible imams. It requires the country’s president to hold “convinced belief” in the Islamic Republic. The president and his regime must exemplify faith in a theocratic judicial system so extreme that presenting a non-Islamic identity is punishable by death.¹²

Thirty countries require their head of state to belong to a particular religion. In 17 of those 30, the leader must be Islamic and male.¹³ Pew’s survey of the world’s Muslims found 99% in Afghanistan and 91% in Iraq want Sharia as the official law of the land, globally. A median of 76% of Sharia supporters in South Asia back the death penalty for leaving Islam.¹⁴

Under those systems, preferring one faith isn’t a scandal. It’s the law. That is why Charlie Kirk argued bluntly that “Islam is not compatible with western civilization,”¹⁵and why a House Judiciary subcommittee held a February hearing titled “Sharia-Free America: Why Political Islam & Sharia Law Are Incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.”¹⁶

Given the fundamentalist radicalism of Sharia, it should surprise nobody — and scandalize most — that an Islamic senator and Iranian representative won’t hire applicants who don’t match their purity test. Jews need not apply. Latin Americans need not apply. No Canadians, no Christians, no mormons. Nobody who doesn’t meet the purity test that accepts only Muslims, Middle Easterners, North Africans, or South Asians.

The argument isn’t about our Muslim neighbors who run businesses, raise families, and serve in uniform. It’s about a system that fuses mosque and state and ranks citizens by creed. Our Constitution was written to make this impossible. Many Muslims came here to escape theocratic discrimination. The least we owe them, and everyone else, is a state Capitol that doesn’t promote hatred and exclusion.

Flip it around

Imagine a Republican lawmaker posting a paid internship for applicants who “identify as Christian and/or western European, Canadian, and/or American.” The outrage would be instant, bipartisan, and career-ending. The Civil Rights Division would make it a high-profile scandal involving evil white privilege. This standard should not change simply because the beneficiaries have persecution status, real or perceived. If persecution rates determined legal protection, Jews would be first in line. Per capita, no group in America endures more hatred.

A “Christians only” call for interns would instantly lead every newscast in Colorado. This one has led nowhere. As of Wednesday evening, I could find no story from The Denver Post, The Colorado Sun, Colorado Public Radio, 9News, KDVR, the Aurora Sentinel, the Coloradoan, The Gazette, or Colorado Politics. Coloradans had to hear about it from Libs of Tiktok, the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire, and Townhall.¹⁷

I spent most of my career in mainstream newsrooms, among graduates of journalism-schools. Few know what Title VII says or why the Constitution forbids religious tests. Most treat the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause as a protection that applies only to members of demographics enslaved or otherwise tortured during the early stages of this country’s short history — during timews when white culture was more obnoxious and privileged than portrayed in the movies.

They understand discrimination as a story with assigned roles: The bigot is white and Christian, and white Christians can never be victims. A flyer that excludes them doesn’t register as discrimination. After J-school indoctrination, it sounds like inclusion and diversity. When laws apply circumstantially — based on identity — equal protection gets reduced to a joke.

Few professionals in any news platform challenge that script. A 2022 survey by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School found that only 3.4% of American journalists identify as Republicans.¹⁸ When nearly everyone shares the same assumptions, nobody asks: Would we cover this if the roles were reversed? They lack the legal knowledge and civil rights virtue required for the question to arise.

Civil rights law has no list of approved victims. It protects the Baptist, the Buddhist, the Muslim, and the atheist, along with the grandchild of Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, and Lebanon. A reporter who can’t see that won’t recognize bold, unlawful discrimination — even on a flyer, with a state email address, pasted on a wall inside the capitol.

Jodeh and Zokaie should pull the flyer, open the internship to every qualified student, and apologize to those they prejudicially rejected. Legislative leaders should insist on it. If they don’t, the EEOC and the Colorado Civil Rights Division know where to find them.

That straight-A student in Aurora with Latin American ancestry deserves an equal shot at a state-funded internship. So does everyone else, without regard for the human construct of demographic identity — the foundation of most human rights abuses. 

Colorado media and law enforcement need to expose and scrutinize this potential crime — an apparent act of theocratic prejudice that should repulse all virtuous Americans.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT WAYNE’S WORD

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.