AFA Commentator Claims First Amendment Not Intended to Protect Adherents of Islam

On Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh addresses the validity of the claims advanced by American Family Association radio host Bryan Fischer about the constitutional status of Islam.  In a posting on the Renew America website, Fischer writes:

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. He was told by the Bey of Tripoli that Islam requires Muslims to rob, kill and pillage infidel Christians wherever they find them. Jefferson naturally found that hard to believe, so he bought a copy of the Koran to read it for himself. Sure enough, it's right in there, in the 109 verses of the Koran that call for violence against the infidels.

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.

In a concise analysis of the relevant historical resources, Volokh effectively refutes Fischer’s tirade, concluding: “I know of no sources that suggested that anyone during the Framing era understood the Constitution as excluding “Mahometans,” or non-Christians more generally, from either the Free Exercise Clause or the No Religious Test Clause.”

JFB