Divide over Islam dominated religious-freedom news in 2010

WASHINGTON (ABP) — Judging from end-of-year assessments published in the last few days, there seems fairly universal agreement among close observers of faith and public life that the biggest religion story of 2010 in this country was also the biggest religious-freedom story: Islam and its discontents.

But the year’s often-nasty spats over mosques and Sharia law should not completely eclipse 2010’s other important religious-liberty developments, say many who study church-state relations.

Islam and the First Amendment

Nine years after a small group of Islamic extremists attacked the United States, several small disturbances over Islam seemed to merge into a perfect storm at the end of the summer — one with its eye centered on Lower Manhattan.

Feisal Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, the main proponents of building an Islamic center near Ground Zero.

The so-called “Ground Zero mosque” (which was neither actually at Ground Zero, nor technically a mosque) led newscasts for days in late August and topped the Religion Newswriters Association’s 2010 poll of the year’s 10 biggest religion stories. The group’s members also voted the main proponent of constructing an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, Feisal Abdul Rauf, as RNA’s “Religion Newsmaker of the Year.”

“As newsmaker of the year, Rauf beat out Pope Benedict XVI, the many faith-based workers helping victims of the Haitian government and Sarah Palin, who devoted significant portions of her second best selling book arguing that candidates for office take a public Christian stand,” said the association’s release announcing the poll results — generally considered the gold standard in gauging religion news.

The dispute brought national attention to other spats over the construction of Islamic facilities — in locales as diverse as Murfreesboro, Tenn.; Staten Island, N.Y.; and Temecula, Calif. — as many politicians took the opportunity to amp up combative rhetoric about Islam in an election year when conservative anger featured prominently at the polls. And a previously obscure Florida pastor raised an international furor with plans — from which he subsequently backed down — to hold a public burning of copies of the Quran on Sept. 11.

But the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero exposed deeper fault lines over, and suspicions about, the role of Islam in American public life. In the Tennessee dispute, for instance, many mosque opponents claimed that Islam was a political system rather than a faith to be protected by the First Amendment.

Some proponents of a successful ballot initiative to amend the Oklahoma Constitution used similar rhetoric to argue for their measure, which would ban judges from referring to Islamic or international law in their legal reasoning. While it passed overwhelmingly in the November election, federal courts have prevented its enforcement pending the outcome of challenges to its constitutionality. Opponents say it violates the First Amendment by targeting Islam for special disdain.

Don Byrd, who blogs for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, lamented the tenor of 2010’s disputes over Islam in his end-of-the-year review.

“Nine years after the continued assurances of both Democratic and Republican presidents that we are not at war with Islam, and that it is a religion of peace, why are we still debating the equal rights of Muslim-Americans to practice their faith?” he asked. “Why are the murderous actions of terrorists still being ascribed to an entire religion and all of its peaceful followers? Why would a U.S. attorney in the year 2010 need to file a brief to explain to a Tennessee court that Islam is, in fact, a bona fide religion?

“Is it merely the mania of an election year that has an entire state like Oklahoma voting to amend their constitution for fear of their courtrooms being overtaken by Sharia law? The fearful projections of a nation in economic distress that have resulted in an increase in workplace religious discrimination claims on the rise among Muslim-Americans? Or has this year revealed a deepening cultural rupture between America’s religious pluralism and the constitutional principles that protect it?”

Other religious-liberty developments

But Islam’s status in the United States wasn’t the only big religious-liberty news in 2010. Major court decisions, election-year rhetorical debates over the First Amendment and ongoing questions about the lines between gay rights and religious freedom were all important — if sometimes overlooked — developments in religious freedom.

The Supreme Court handed down two significant decisions touching on religious liberty in 2010. In a complex and limited April decision (Salazar v. Buono), the court let stand a federal government decision to preserve a cross — originally erected as a World War I memorial on public land in a remote California desert location — by transferring the small plot of land on which the cross stood to private hands.

But, to the relief of many church-state separationists, the court’s plurality did not get into the question of whether the man who originally challenged the cross had legal standing to bring the suit in the first place.

In June, a closely divided court said in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez that the University of California was within its rights to deny the benefits of official recognition to a campus group because of the organization’s faith-based membership standards.

The justices, in a 5-4 decision, said that the university’s San Francisco-based Hastings College of Law does not have to exempt its chapter of the Christian Legal Society from a campus policy that bars officially recognized student groups from denying membership or leadership positions on the basis of religion or sexual orientation.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (SCOTUS photo)

The court’s four left-of-center justices and centrist “swing justice,” Anthony Kennedy, formed the majority while the four conservative justices were in the minority. Justice Samuel Alito, in a stinging dissenting opinion, said the majority’s decision was predicated on a belief in “no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning.”

Gay rights and religious freedom

The thorny questions that surround protecting both the legal rights of gays and lesbians and those who, for religious reasons, oppose homosexuality featured prominently in two of the year's major legal issues.

In August, a federal judge overturned a California ban on gay marriage, saying proponents of the ban had put forth no arguments explaining why the state had a rational, secular interest in limiting marriage rights to heterosexual couples. Opponents said if the decision stood, it could open the door to limitations on the religious freedom of individuals and institutions in the state who oppose same-sex marriage.

Worries about the religious freedom of chaplains who oppose homosexuality also featured prominently in the debate over successful attempts, in Congress and the courts, to overturn the military’s ban on openly gay service members. Conservative religious groups attempted to rally their supporters to prevent the repeal of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law by pointing to chaplains who worried that being required to minister to openly gay soldiers could prevent them from speaking out about their convictions on homosexuality.

While the Pentagon’s report reviewing the issue noted significantly more opposition to doing away with the ban among the services’ chaplaincy corps than among the general public or service members at large, it said their fears were overblown.

“[T]he reality is that in today’s U.S. military, people of sharply different moral values and religious convictions — including those who believe that abortion is murder and those who do not, and those who believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and those who do not … already co-exist, work, live, and fight together on a daily basis," the report said. "The other reality is that policies regarding service members’ individual expression and free exercise of religion already exist, and we believe they are adequate. Service members will not be required to change their personal views and religious beliefs; they must, however, continue to respect and serve with others who hold different views and beliefs.”

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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Related ABP content:

Judge refuses to block Tennessee mosque (11/18/2010)

Analysis: Mixed bag for social conservatives in midterm election (11/3/2010)

SBC ethics czar Land comes out in favor of Tennessee mosque (10/4/2010)

Opinion: Of mosques, Islamophobes, freedom and responsibility (9/21/2010)

BPFNA urges support for Muslims; N.Y. project director decries discourse (9/13/2010)

Baptists worldwide register protests against threatened Quran burning (9/10/2010)

Opinion: Loving Muslims (9/10/2010)

Faith, fear clash in middle Tennessee over proposed mosque (9/10/2010)

Baptist leaders meet with Holder, denounce Baptists trashing Islam (9/8/2010)