The First Amendment Protects All of Us — Or None of Us
Breaking down the free exercise clause, the establishment clause, and the anti-Shariah movement with Dahlia Taha from the Muslim Public Affairs Council
I’m grateful I had the chance to sit down with Dahlia Taha, Founding Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s First Amendment Center, for the kickoff of their new video series on religious freedom under the U.S. Constitution. Spreading awareness about the rights of all Americans matters because the same government targeting Muslim Americans today has the power to come for every faith community tomorrow. Let’s Address This.
The First Amendment has two clauses that work together to protect every single person in this country, citizen or not.
The free exercise clause guarantees the right to practice your faith without government interference. And the establishment clause prohibits the government from declaring an official religion, favoring one faith over another, or singling one out for hostility. Together, they form the wall between religion and state that this country was founded on.
If you’ve been following the wave of hearings in Congress targeting “Shariah law”, this interview is for you. The bottom line: these bills are already unconstitutional. They aren’t solving a real problem. They’re using the Constitution as cover for religious bigotry.
Watch my interview with Dahlia on YouTube.
The rise of anti-Islamic sentiment in the U.S. today is exactly why I launched my platform Islam Today. There, I share scholarship and faith-based reflections to reach more people with truth over fear. It is also free to read and share, because education should be accessible to everyone.
Thank you for tuning into Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid — an independent media source where I share fact-based analysis and host interviews about the issues too often ignored by corporate media. Support this work by becoming a free or paid subscriber so we can continue to protect your human rights, and our democracy.
AS a committed but un-activist atheist (raised Presbyterian) and a browser among other religions. I have become a committed supporter of the 1st amendment. None of us now living, except for the more primitive sects stuck in the centuries before the enlightenment, have any experience of the violent religious divisions plaguing Europe nor any understanding of how those divisions followed the refugee/settlers who landed in the New World, convinced they had escaped the old world and that their particular sect could flourish unimpeded in the new. Not even 100 years on they were replicating the power struggles tearing Europe to shreds. By the time the Constitution was being drafted all that sturm and drang looked very like it could tear the new nation to shreds as well.
Which is why the founders added the remedy of the first Amendment. Strife did not cease, it just went underground and bubbled and festered over the centuries because the religious wars were not really about religion they were about who got to hold the power. Prior to universal education, few people except the elite, had any access to education, but for the protestant religions, the ability to read the bible was imperative and somehow the settlers, created a rickety system of Sunday school to enable people to learn to "read" (memorize) selected bible verses. The earliest public schools ran largely on religion and the Bible or "Primers", heavily dependent on biblical teaching, were the chief instruments of literacy.
The effects of this history have never been erased. Surges of religiosity have erupted periodically . often spurred by self proclaimed prophets with "revival" meetings providing a thrilling form of free entertainment. Increasingly over the decades religion has become entangled in politics with the ulterior motive of advancing and capturing secular power. We are enduring another such surge, aided and abetted by mass media, again with the aim of accumulating wealth and power. It is an unfortunate mental quirk apparently unique to homo sapiens.
Just remember it is all about wealth and POWER.
Absolutely - the belief that breaking the rules never has negative consequences for everyone, very unfortunately, remains one of humanity's dumbest blind spots.