The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is not just a raving nut on the fringe; he consorts with Republicans at the top tier of political power. GOP presidential hopefuls Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee have appeared on his web show. Newt Gingrich channels large amounts of money through Fischer’s organization to suppress gay rights.

And yesterday this hate-filled fundamentalist freak came right out and advocated denying First Amendment rights to all Muslims, because, he says, the founding fathers never intended the First Amendment to protect the religion of Islam.

This is really bad craziness. On toast.

Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.

Our government has no obligation to allow a treasonous ideology to receive special protections in America, but this is exactly what the Democrats are trying to do right now with Islam.

From a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America. They have that privilege at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States. The Constitution, it bears repeating, is not a suicide pact. For Muslims, patriotism is not the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the First Amendment is.