Thursday, August 28, 2025
Gee, If Only We Had a Justice Department Interested in Religious Liberty
Valentina Gomez, a trivia question seeking the Republican nomination for a House seat in Texas, launched her campaign in the traditional manner: by filming herself setting a copy of the Koran on fire and pledging to “end Islam in Texas.”
I do not hold anyone in the world guilty by association because Gomez exists. I do not favor the politics of “why haven’t you denounced this yet?,” which are pointless and never-ending. (I do think both are related, in that we have, literally from the top down, a gleefully vulgar culture in which the worst of social media is treated as normative, at worst, and at best as something one is supposed to shrug at.) And as a civil libertarian I would no more try to stop a moron from committing backyard blasphemy than I would try to stop a different moron from burning the American flag.
But this is the kind of public action that presents a straightforward layup for pro-religious liberty types, who typically think 1) religion and religious liberty are good and 2) “end[ing]” a religion in a political jurisdiction of the United States is less good. It would be especially easy for a regime whose officers comment freely and threateningly about everything they wish, indifferent to matters of jurisdiction, whether an action falls within the public or private realm, and whether the subject is important or idiotic. A regime with a stated commitment to religious liberty and enough time on its hands to attempt to run pro baseball, the corporate design department at Cracker Barrel and also the rest of the ostensibly private corporate and industrial market, and Sydney Sweeney’s ad campaigns probably has enough time to register a mild condemnation of a congressional candidate who seeks the mantle of her party by pointing a flamethrower at a religious text.
One wishes that the current Justice Department had a whole division devoted to civil rights and a penchant for lip-service devotion to religious liberty, even if its ostensible priorities mostly involve “anti-Christian bias” and anti-semitism, ie. Christians and those who are first in line to be graciously tolerated by the Christian majority in the semi-confessional state sought by National “Conservatism.”
It would be nice if it also had a whole commission devoted to the subject of religious liberty, established by the executive order of someone whose ghost-writers’ sense of irony is so keen that they can direct him to quote Ronald Reagan a) at all, and b) specifically to the effect that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” (Good one!) And it would be super if, on top of that, multiple members of that commission, including, say, its chair, were a) neither mute, deaf, nor blind and b) actually lived in Texas. In fairness, the chair–Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick–may be more occupied at present with the confessional-state portion of his duties and less clear on the tolerate-the-infidel aspects of his job. But it’s really not that time-intensive, if you already run your government on social media, to shoot out a message like “We don’t do things like ‘end Islam’ in this country. Yet.”
Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 28, 2025 at 10:10 AM | Permalink
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