Bloch's job as Special Counsel, among other things, is to investigate and prosecute officials in the federal executive branch for personnel violations and whistleblower complaints.

Why?

After taking office, Bloch, a native Kansan and a faithful Catholic, found that his predecessor -- Clinton appointee Elaine Kaplan -- used the OSC to enforce a policy against bias in federal workplaces based on "sexual orientation," i.e., homosexuality.

Bloch, as Special Counsel, examined federal civil rights law and found that it doesn't list sexual orientation as a "protected class." Race, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, and political affiliation are covered, but not sexual orientation.

As a result, Bloch removed information about discrimination based upon "sexual orientation" from the OSC website and printed materials to avoid public confusion about OSC's enforcement authority.

Attacks on Bloch soon followed, culminating in Bloch's May 24 testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The Log Cabin Republicans, a gay lobbying group, called upon "Mr. Bloch today to immediately restore protections for gay and lesbian federal employees" (March 18, 2004).

Federal GLOBE, an umbrella organization for gay, lesbian and bisexual federal employees, called for Bloch to be fired (October 7, 2004).

The Advocate, a D.C. gay newspaper, accused Bloch of trying "to ditch protections for gay federal employees" (April 12, 2005).

Bloch has consistently argued he is only acting within the parameters of the Congressional legislation he has sworn to uphold.

As Bloch explained to Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich) at the May 24 Senate hearing, "We are limited by our enforcement statutes as Congress gives them. The courts have specifically rejected sexual orientation as a class protection."

In other words, if Congress wants Bloch to treat homosexuals as a "protected class," it must pass the legislation to authorize this action.

Bloch's opponents have confused the situation by citing a 1998 executive order of President Clinton that prohibited discrimination based upon sexual orientation in the federal workplace.

What Bloch's critics fail to mention, however, is that the executive order does not provides any legal remedies for a violation. In other words, if Bloch tried to enforce the 1998 executive order he would be in violation of the order itself as well as his own enforcement statutes.

Bloch's predecessor admitted at the time that the executive order does not add "any new substantive legal rights" (Washington Blade, June 5, 1998). Kaplan reiterated this in a letter to Bloch, saying that the Clinton executive order is not enforceable by OSC, and is merely a "symbolic statement" for federal personnel policy.

In spite of all this, Ms. Kaplan interpreted OSC's federal civil laws to include sexual orientation as a protected class, even though the statutes fail to mention it. Kaplan evidently viewed her interpretation as policy rather law because she told Bloch that she does not dispute her right to "change her policy." In other words, she saw it as a changeable policy, not a requirement of law under OSC's enforcement statutes.

Bloch is not given the credit of having a simple difference of opinion with the Clinton appointee who preceded him. No, he is accused of refusing to treat homosexuals as a "protected class" because he is Catholic!

In an interview with American Spectator (April 15, 2005) magazine, Peter Leon, an aid to Congressman Eliot Engel, said he opposed Bloch because he was a "devout Catholic." The Catholic League's Bill Donohue responded with an open letter to Engel, asking him to comment on his aid's bigotry (April 24, 2005). Engel quickly responded to Donohue by reprimanding Leon for his comment.

To his critics, Bloch's Catholic "extremism" is supposedly corroborated by his hiring of two graduates from the Ave Maria School of Law, founded by Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza.

In a March 25 interview for NPR, Jeffery Ruch, the head of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility [PEER], described Bloch's hiring of Ave Maria graduates as "personnel practices ... taken straight from the Da Vinci Code rather than the civil service manual."

This mention of the Ave Maria Law School graduates was not an isolated instance. It was repeated throughout the print and electronic coverage of the Bloch controversy. He was also bashed for hiring the former headmaster of a Catholic high school as a part-time consultant.

It's remarkable that people don't even hesitate to make anti-Catholic statements in the media. The mere fact that someone is the graduate of a Catholic University or taught in a Catholic institution should neither condemn nor earn them a disparaging label.

As Bill Donohue put it in an earlier press release, "If Scott Bloch were Jewish and he was publicly criticized for hiring graduates of Yeshiva University law school, it would be branded anti-Semitic."

There is an associated complaint against Bloch. He is accused of transferring internal critics, two of which are alleged to be homosexual, out of OSC headquarters in D.C. After Bloch reassigned 12 employees to various field offices, The Washington Blade, another gay newspaper in D.C., accused Bloch of discrimination.

Bloch was not aware at the time that any of these employees were homosexual. Cathy Deeds, spokeswoman for OSC, told The Window, "Bloch had no way of knowing the sexual practices or preferences of those who were transferred."

Things have been quieter for Scott Bloch and the OSC since the Senate hearings in May. In fact, a May 17 letter from Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), chair of the House Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Jon Porter (R-Nev), chair of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, praises Bloch for reducing the huge backlog left over from the Kaplan years at the OSC. (A Government Accountability Office report commissioned prior to Bloch's arrival was critical of that backlog.) Chairman Davis and Porter were commenting on the results of a bipartisan review of OSC's improved performance during Bloch's tenure.

But the political lobbying network that elicited so much press coverage on Bloch during the past year continues. On June 7, the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay and lesbian lobby group, and the Federal GLOBE called upon the White House "to either ask Bloch to change his policy position, or step down."

Catholics can only hope that Bloch's critics will stop slinging epithets at his faith and start debating the issues. Clearly the responsibility for determining whether or not sexual orientation should be a protected class lies with Congress not with the Office of Special Counsel or Scott Bloch.

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