After 9/11, suspicion of Islam hardened into an assumption in Texas that Muslim identity itself signals danger, writes a scholar of constitutional law.

“I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone,” Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, wrote on social media in June 2026. Since late 2025, Texas officials have investigated plans for a Muslim-friendly housing development outside Dallas, as well as a small Dallas organization that offers religious divorce counseling. Gov. Greg Abbott also designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights group, a foreign terrorist organization under Texas law.

In May 2026 Abbott threatened to pull US$530,000 in state funding from Grand Prairie unless the city canceled a private Eid celebration at a water park. He also threatened to withhold funding from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport unless it dropped plans for ablution stations, the washing facilities Muslims use before prayer.

State Rep. Alan Schoolcraft, a Republican helping lead the “Sharia Free Texas Caucus,” has framed the distinction explicitly. He told the Houston Chronicle that his concern “has nothing to do with faith, with religion,” but rather with “cultural differences, refusing to assimilate, and trying to establish a parallel culture.”

He has also said lawmakers intend to try to define what qualifies as a religion, arguing that Islam is “much more than a religion.” He has not explained where the line between Islam as religion and Islam as culture or politics would fall, or which Muslim practices would lose the protections ordinarily afforded to religious exercise.

  • thethrilloftime69@feddit.onlineEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    I read Stephen Kinzers book “The Brothers” recently. His purpose is to explain why the US makes the foreign policy decisions it makes. The Dulles Brothers were head of the CIA and the Secretary of State at the same time under Eisenhower. Kinzer depicts them as intellectually incurious. Blaming the Soviet Union for events in the third world when they were reasonable responses to European Colonialism. The Dulles brothers refused to understand the local conditions that lead to certain events. Kinzer goes so far as to say that lack of intellectual curiosity is an American trait. And the cold war was an extension of the American ethos of manifest destiny.

    I mean you can see that here. Republicans refuse to care to understand what’s going on in these minority communities and just blame them for not integrating. Likely they don’t give 2 shits what’s going on in these communities and they lack the intellectual curiosity to ask bigger questions. This can be an as an extension of Manifest Destiny in a way.