Bryan Fischer: McCarthy and Jefferson Agree, States can Regulate Religious Expression.
More ludicrous historical revisionism from the evangelical right…
If Jefferson and McCarthy are right, then states have considerable latitude under the Constitution as given to us by the Founders (not the Constitution as disfigured beyond recognition by activist judges) to regulate the expression of religion within their borders.
States like Virginia, whose founders explicitly wanted to protect the free exercise of religion for Muslims, would be free to do so. Other states would not be bound by what Virginia decided to do, and would have the freedom to regulate Islam in any way they saw fit to preserve public peace and order.
States, according to the understanding expressed by Jefferson and McCarthy, would thus be constitutionally free to restrict the building of new mosques, which they might be inclined to do on the grounds that 95.3% of all Muslims who attend mosque on a weekly basis go to one that distributes literature calling for the violent overthrow of the United States in the name of Allah. They would be free to ban Muslim Student Associations on college campuses in their state, which they might be inclined to do on the grounds that MSAs are offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and hence dedicated to ‘eliminating and destroying the Western civilizationfrom within’ by “‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.’
Until the Constitution was ratified in 1788 a few of the original 13 States did have their own exclusionary religious laws designed solely to prohibit other “Christian” sects. However once the constitution became the law of the land the new “Federal law” superseded the State laws and has been almost universally enforced by the courts for over two hundred years. After all these years Bryan Fischer wants to challenge that and claim that states have the right to enact laws against and deny building permits to Islamic congregations?