Here’s an issue that, mutatis mutandis, seems perfectly fitted for the federal Religious Liberty Commission. Politico reports on strong anti-religious liberty sentiment in Texas–focusing on religious arbitration and the right of religious groups and individuals, in common with all other citizens, to acquire and develop property–that has been a major piece of the Republican primary races for governor and attorney general as well as, for some reason, the Republican primary race for a Senate seat.
On the religious arbitration front, the candidates are engaged in full-on Oughts revivalism, so much so that I keep expecting to hear Incubus and The Strokes playing in the campaign ads. Thus, AG primary candidate Chip Roy, whose record shows many instances of his capacity to pay tribute to the better angels of our nature, now pledges to “stand athwart the advance of Sharia Law.” Here’s AG primary candiate Aaron Reitz, formerly head of the DoJ’s Office of Legal Policy, asserting that Sharia has “absolutely zero place in the Lone Star State,” and telling Politico that the building of houses of worship in Texas is “explosive” and “alarming.” Similar sentiments have been emphasized by a number of the other candidates.
Meanwhile, eight months after the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division closed an investigation into a planned real estate development surrounding a mosque in the vicinity of Plano, the candidates continue to press for the continuation of heavy-handed state governmental efforts to stymie the land owners’ attempts to exercise their property rights. This is literally the kind of thing for which RLUIPA was invented. This official page details the many efforts Gov. Abbott has engaged in to use every coercive and investigative tool at his disposal against the development. (Who knew that Texans were such big fans of deliberately wielded regulatory sludge?) Abbott, too, has asserted that “Sharia law is not allowed in Texas.”
As was the case with a good deal of rhetoric around Sharia a decade and more ago, this is a lie. An essentially useless Texas law limits state family courts from extending comity to foreign judgments or arbitration awards that violate “constitutional rights or public policy.” Judgments based on Sharia that don’t violate those things are enforceable; judgments that don’t are already unenforceable, regardless of whether they are based on Islamic, Christian, or Belgian law. To actually ban “Sharia law” in Texas would be the same as banning, inter alia, Christian conciliation practices–not in the sense that it would be similar, but in the sense that federal and state law would prohibit the state from aiming at just one of those things, either demanding freedom for both or subjecting both to the same limitations.
The Religious Liberty Commission’s mission includes “identifying current threats to domestic religious liberty” and “[r]ecommending programs to increase awareness of and celebrate America’s peaceful religious pluralism.” It specifies an interest in “[t]he First Amendment rights of pastors, religious leaders, [and] houses of worship,” “[a]ttacks across America on houses of worship of many religions,” and “[t]he right of all Americans to freely exercise their faith without fear or Government censorship or retaliation.” Both the actual efforts to single out, bully, and impede Muslims in Texas in the exercise of their faith and the ongoing bellicose rhetoric of those seeking to wield state power, which hardly suggests awareness of America’s peaceful religious pluralism, are a natural fit for investigation and discussion by that commission. And its chairman, a Texan, should be especially well-qualified to shine a light on these anti-religious efforts and statements.
I hope that groups like the Becket Fund and the USCCB Committee on Religious Liberty (whose current chair is on the commission’s advisory board of religious leaders), which have long championed religious liberty for people of all faiths, according to both the letter and the spirit of the law, will urge the commission to give swift attention to this ongoing, disturbing issue.