Here we go again. Bryan Fischer, writing for Renew America (you can usually tell it’s some hard-right conservative Christian Tea Party publication when the name of the site includes words like “America,” “freedom,” “liberty,” “patriot,” etc.), argues that the First Amendment does not apply to non-Christians. Especially not Muslims.

Fischer used to be a director for the “Idaho Values Alliance” (another code word there, “values,” as in “we want to impose ours on you by force of law”; whenever you see words like “values” or “family,” especially preceding the word “first,” it’s a good bet it’s conservative Christian), and now hosts a radio show called Focal Point. Fischer is vehemently anti-Muslim.

He begins:

The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity. They were making no effort to give special protections to Islam. Quite the contrary. We actually at the time were dealing with our first encounters with jihad in the form of the Barbary Pirates, which is why Jefferson bought a copy of the Koran.

That’s nice. Via his fortuitous name-dropping non-sequitur, we’re supposed the believe that the founders, especially Jefferson, were specifically excluding those barbarous Muslims. Except, not really. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, seen as a precursor to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, set the tone when conservative Christians of the day tried to hijack that document and make it about Christianity alone. From Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography:

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it would read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;’ the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.

So, right there, Fischer’s whole thesis is kinda shot to hell. He continues:

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.

Here’s where he tries to explain why Islam and other religions have enjoyed protection up until now: we’re doing it as a courtesy. It’s not law, mind you; we have no obligation to allow Hindus or Muslims or even Jews to practice their religion. We’re just letting them because we’re polite. But we’re not crazy. We know that giving Jews and Muslims and Hindus and all those other nasty people the same religious protections that Christians enjoy would destroy the nation.

Fischer then gets to his point:

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.

He backs this up by going back to Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who, in the early 19th century, wrote:

The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects…

Well, pretty ironclad right there, huh? Almost two centuries ago, a Supreme Court justice, in a commentary not part of any law, once opined that the First Amendment was intended for Christians only. That trumps just about everything, right? After all, there’s probably been no further commentary on the idea since then, and Story was, after all, the final arbiter on how we interpret the First Amendment. </sarcasm>

In the 1984 Supreme Court decision Wallace v. Jaffree, which ruled against prayer in public schools, Stevens wrote (directly citing Story’s statement in the footnotes) that:

At one time, it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.

Not that any of this would matter to Fischer. He’s pretty far out there, holding that the Nazis were gay (ergo homosexuality leads to such things), that the genocide against native Americans was okay because the natives were not morally “qualified” to control the continent, and, convinced that Muslims are bent on overthrowing the United States, advocates the forced expulsion of all Muslims from the country.

Fischer’s writing serves as an excellent example of exactly why the First Amendment is so vital: those who are convinced that their religious views are morally superior will, inevitably, attempt to rob all others of their own freedom to think and choose as they wish. Not satisfied with simply applying their moral code to their own actions, they will feel compelled to force others into their mold or else suppress or evict them.

Fortunately, the First Amendment denies people like Fischer the ability to carry out the acts which, in their First Amendment freedoms, they so passionately advance.