As long as the Religious Liberty Commission’s charge includes both “[r]ecommending programs to increase awareness of and celebrate America’s peaceful religious pluralism” and advancing the religious freedom rights of public employees, may I offer another educational project for its consideration? That project is Emory Law graduate Mike Howell, currently a fellow at the Heritage Foundation–not working on religious liberty issues, if one may offer sincere thanks to Providence for its small and tender mercies. He is also currently advocating–on social media, because of course–a ban on “head coverings and hoods” on the floor of the House of Representatives, for “decorum.” (No word on the status of decorum and head coverings in the Senate.) The discussion makes clear that Howell would offer a gerrymandered exception for kippahs. I say gerrymandered for two reasons: Like the 28-sided district in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, the distinction patently lacks a sound explanation. And also like that district, the actual explanation is obvious. Lest there be any doubt, one may turn to Howell’s comment that he’s “not even getting into whether Islam is a legitimate religion.” Jefferson would have wept. (Incidentally, it’s not clear how he would treat a woman wearing a sheitel. Or how he would deal with Sikhs. Maybe he would be better off avoiding all the messy details and just recommending that Congress discriminate against Muslims.)
Let me say in fairness that the rabbi arguing back against Howell in the excerpt linked to above, Yaakov Menken, is actually on the Commission’s advisory board of religious leaders. He is quite right in arguing that “religious garb in no way harms decorum,” and that certainly includes Islamic religious garb; and he’s right to acknowledge and celebrate America’s religious diversity. As a fellow tolerated person of these United States, I’m glad to see it. In daily discourse, the phrase “strange new respect” has become the lead-in to a joke. Still, the Heritage Foundation is not exactly the place I expected to find strange new respect for the idea of turning the United States into Quebec. (As an aside: Howell has spent much more time as a Swamp denizen than I did. But even a little time there taught me one thing: the way to tell the difference between the serious people, and the unserious people who like to look serious, is that the unserious people are the ones using phrases like “We will handle it at the principal level.”)