By R.J. Morales | TX3DNews
McKINNEY, Texas — Two weeks after the McKinney City Council sat through hours of heated opposition to a proposed mosque, the same chamber heard a very different message Tuesday night.
Speaker after speaker thanked council members for following the law, defended religious freedom and pushed back against rhetoric surrounding the McKinney Islamic Association project and the recall effort that followed.
“Last session, you heard hours of bigotry. Now you’re going to hear hours of appreciation and respect,” McKinney resident Muhammad Khan told council. “So I hope you guys enjoy that.”
The Aug. 18 meeting came two weeks after a contentious hearing over the mosque site plan that drew opposition over traffic, Islam and Sharia law and appearances by U.S. Rep. Keith Self and state Rep. Keresa Richardson. A recall effort targeting four council members followed.
Religious Freedom at the Center
Religious freedom and equal treatment came up repeatedly throughout the night.
June Jenkins, president of the Collin County NAACP, compared the rhetoric directed at Muslims with discrimination faced by Black Americans decades earlier.
“Fifty to 60 years ago, many of the same fears, tactics and hate we hear being used against Muslims today were used against the Black community,” Jenkins said.
“When it comes to equal protection under the law, let me be clear: We are not going back.”
Theresa Thomas, first vice president and political action chair of the Collin County NAACP, took the issue beyond the mosque and recall.
“This moment is also about who we are as Americans and who gets to define what being American is,” Thomas said. “I don’t need my government to practice my religion. I don’t need my government to show preference to my religion. I need my government to apply the law equally.”
Christian speakers also spoke in defense of religious freedom.
“We cannot use our political power today to deny them theirs,” said Marcus Lloyd, a McKinney resident who spoke about his Christian faith. “We cannot become the very thing we say we are afraid of.”
Collin Packer, an Allen pastor and faith leader who said he is a direct descendant of Collin McKinney, told council he had watched fellow Christians make hateful comments two weeks earlier and decided he could not remain silent.
“It was Dr. King who said, ‘It’s not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends that we remember most,’” Packer said.
He then addressed Muslim residents directly.
“We’re grateful that you’re our neighbors here in Collin County, and I’ll do all I can as a Christian to try to live into that as fellow neighbors, to support one another in these days ahead.”
Political Figures Join Public Comment
Evan Hunt, the Democratic nominee challenging Self in Texas’ 3rd Congressional District, called the recall effort “a wave of hate in our community” and accused Self of helping fuel the division.
“Hate, bigotry and prejudice are not Christian,” Hunt said. “They are not American and they do not represent McKinney.”
“American greatness has never come from pushing people down,” Hunt added. “It has always come from lifting people up.”
Kendall Scudder, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, praised council members for defending civil rights and religious liberty.
“Sometimes when you have a congressional chamber with 435 people in it, you occasionally run across a dud,” Scudder said. “And unfortunately for all of us, that dud is here in Texas.”
Scudder added “We’re watching your bravery. We’re watching your strength.”
Former McKinney Mayor George Fuller warned about the consequences of turning a local dispute into a national political fight.
“When the cameras leave and the agitators move to the next city, the next social media outrage finds its next target,” Fuller said. “They will not be here to live with the consequences. We will.”
Fuller later turned directly to Self, calling his appearance at the previous council meeting “some of the most cowardly political theater” and pointing to an earlier video in which Self spoke to Muslims about constitutional protections.
Criticism of Self and Richardson
Dr. Taha Ansari, a McKinney doctor, also criticized Self and Richardson.
“I want to address a disease that is spreading in McKinney. The disease is called ignorance,” Ansari said.
“And unfortunately, we have two representatives, Keith Self and Keresa Richardson, who have been infected by this disease,” he continued. “They comment about Islam and Sharia as if they understand their religion better than people who actually practice it. That’s just plain ignorance.”
“Sharia is not a secret political conspiracy, and it’s not going to replace the Constitution,” Ansari said. “Muslims are Americans. They are subject to the same Constitution and laws as everyone else.”
Ansari accused politicians of stripping context from religious issues and using them to create fear. “This isn’t leadership, this is pandering,” Ansari said.
The public comments continued for nearly two hours, with speakers overwhelmingly supporting the council and its handling of the mosque site plan, a sharp contrast with the opposition that filled the chamber two weeks earlier.
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Religious Freedom Doesn’t End When the Religion Is Islam
As a Black American, I have spent my life watching people invoke tradition, culture, and even religion to justify excluding others. That is one reason the debate over the McKinney mosque expansion feels familiar.
The McKinney Islamic Association sought approval for a larger facility to serve a growing congregation. City officials reviewed the proposal and ultimately approved it after determining that it complied with the applicable development requirements.
Some residents raised concerns about traffic, parking, drainage, and neighborhood impacts. Those are legitimate issues for any major development and deserve discussion.
But anyone who watched the public debate knows that the controversy did not stop there.
Public objections also included warnings about Islam itself, fears of Sharia law, claims that a mosque could become a threat to American values, and broader suspicions directed at Muslims as a group. 456
That is where this discussion stops being about zoning and starts becoming about equal treatment.
The First Amendment does not grant religious liberty only to people we agree with. It does not protect churches while excluding mosques. It does not say that one faith must prove its worthiness before receiving the same rights enjoyed by everyone else.
Religious freedom means that Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists, and everyone else stand equal before the law.
What troubles me most is hearing people who loudly identify themselves as Christians oppose the rights of others to worship freely. Whether one is religious or not, the teachings most commonly associated with Jesus emphasize compassion, humility, mercy, and treating others as you would want to be treated. Those principles are difficult to reconcile with hostility directed at an entire religious community because of fear or suspicion.
Americans have seen this pattern before. Different groups have been treated as outsiders, viewed with suspicion, and told they did not belong. History has not been kind to those moments, and it usually looks back favorably on the people who defended equal rights rather than those who tried to restrict them.
The question before McKinney was never whether residents had a right to agree with Islam. They do not have to. The question is whether Muslims deserve the same constitutional protections as everyone else.
The answer should be simple.
In America, religious liberty belongs to all of us, or it belongs to none of us.
Bill Bee is in Traverse City, MI. ·
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You have probably heard the term “Sharia law” hundreds of times in the past week alone. Depending on where you heard it, you may have been told it means women being forced to cover themselves, thieves having their hands cut off, gay people being executed, adulterers being stoned and, eventually, Muslims replacing the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law.
I’ve been writing quite a bit about Islam lately, and those two words keep popping up over and over again. They’re also a pretty remarkable example of how we can take something enormously complicated, boil it down to a terrifying sound bite, and scare the absolute shit out of people without ever really explaining what it means.
Let’s make this incredibly simple. Sharia is basically a religious framework for how Muslims believe they should live. There isn’t one giant book called The Sharia containing a list of laws that every Muslim follows. Its foundations come from the Quran and teachings and traditions connected to Muhammad, followed by centuries of Muslim scholars interpreting those sources and arguing about what they require. Yes, arguing, because Muslims don’t all agree on this stuff any more than Christians agree on every interpretation of the Bible.
That becomes pretty damn important because when you hear someone say they “follow Sharia,” they could be talking about some incredibly ordinary things like praying five times a day, fasting during Ramadan, giving money to the poor, avoiding pork and alcohol, dressing modestly, or following certain religious rules involving marriage, family, or money. All of that can fall under Sharia.
Let’s also not pretend Christians follow every religious rule with equal enthusiasm. Plenty of Christians will have sex outside of marriage without giving it a second thought, barely make it to church, and ignore a whole bunch of things the Bible tells them to do, but Lent rolls around, and suddenly they’re giving up Diet Coke for 40 days. That’s not even necessarily a criticism; it’s just how humans practice religion. We pick things up, put things down, interpret things differently, and decide some rules matter more than others. Muslims are human beings too, and the idea that every Muslim follows every interpretation of Islamic teaching to the letter makes about as much sense as assuming every Christian does.
For millions of Muslims, following Sharia is primarily about how they personally live their lives, not establishing an Islamic government or deciding how everyone else should be punished. If you’re Christian, this shouldn’t be particularly difficult to understand because a Christian might believe sex should wait until marriage, attend church every Sunday, give money to charity, pray before eating, and make major life decisions based on the Bible. That person is allowing religion to govern huge portions of their life, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want police officers arresting everyone who skips church.
But there is another side of Sharia, and pretending it doesn’t exist wouldn’t be honest. Some traditional interpretations, particularly when enforced by hard-line governments or extremist movements, contain things most Americans would find horrifying, including flogging, amputation, and stoning, along with severe punishments for adultery and, under some interpretations, apostasy or blasphemy. Islamic law has also been used by governments to severely restrict women and criminalize homosexuality.
Those things aren’t made up, and some governments have actually enforced some of them. Afghanistan under the Taliban is one of the clearest examples today, where women and girls have been subjected to sweeping restrictions on education, employment, and participation in public life, all justified by the Taliban through its interpretation of Islam. So if someone tells you there are versions of Sharia that are completely incompatible with American ideas about individual rights, they’re right. There absolutely are.
The problem comes when we make the enormous leap from “some interpretations of Sharia contain horrifying things” to “this is what Muslims believe.” Muslim-majority countries themselves demonstrate why that assumption doesn’t work, with some incorporating Islamic law extensively into their legal systems, others using Islamic rules primarily for matters such as marriage, divorce, or inheritance, and still others operating predominantly secular legal systems. There isn’t one worldwide Sharia system, and there isn’t one person sitting somewhere deciding what Sharia means for roughly two billion Muslims.
Here’s the comparison that finally made the whole thing click for me. Imagine someone who knew almost nothing about Christianity opened the Bible and specifically went hunting for the craziest shit they could find. They’d have plenty of material, because the Old Testament alone contains passages involving executions, slavery, warfare, sexual behavior, and punishments that would be completely unacceptable under American law today.
Now imagine putting those passages on television every night underneath a giant graphic reading CHRISTIAN LAW IS COMING TO AMERICA. Christians would lose their minds, and understandably so, because they’d say you’re ignoring context, explain the difference between the Old and New Testaments, disagree among denominations about what certain passages mean, and point out that virtually nobody is proposing turning every ancient biblical rule into Michigan criminal law.
And they’d be right. That doesn’t make the troubling passages disappear; it means Christianity is considerably more complicated than selecting its most frightening passages and announcing, “See? This is what Christians believe.”
Islam deserves the same intellectual honesty. Not special treatment, the same treatment. If something is disturbing, say it’s disturbing, and if a government is abusing people in the name of Islam or an interpretation of Islamic law conflicts with basic human rights, we should be able to talk about that without being afraid of offending somebody. But taking the most extreme interpretation you can find and assigning it to every Muslim on Earth isn’t an honest way to understand a religion either.
Then there’s the other thing we’ve all heard: “Muslims want Sharia law in America.” Okay, let’s say someone actually does and wants Islamic religious law to replace the Constitution and become the law of the United States. They have a fairly significant problem: the Constitution.
The First Amendment protects religious exercise while preventing the government from establishing a religion, which means Islam doesn’t get to simply replace American law, and neither does Christianity or Judaism. You are free to allow your religion to control enormous portions of your own life, whether that means a Muslim avoiding pork, a Jew eating kosher or a Christian abstaining from sex before marriage, but your religious freedom doesn’t automatically give you the right to impose those religious rules on everybody else.
If your religion tells you not to drink alcohol, don’t drink alcohol, and if it tells you to pray five times a day, pray five times a day, but if your interpretation of your religion tells you somebody should be physically punished because they left your faith, American law has entered the chat.
So maybe asking “What is Sharia law?” isn’t even the best question. Maybe the better question is “What does this particular Muslim mean when they say they follow Sharia?” They could simply mean avoiding pork, praying every day, giving money to people who need it, or following religious guidance involving marriage, banking, and raising a family, while someone else could believe in an extreme interpretation containing laws and punishments most Americans would find abhorrent. Those are dramatically different things, and treating them as though they’re the same is where much of the fear and confusion begins.
A lot of people believe Sharia is simply a Muslim legal code, but it’s not that simple. It’s a massive religious and moral framework that has been interpreted by different people, scholars, cultures, and governments for more than a thousand years, encompassing everything from incredibly ordinary religious practices to deeply spiritual beliefs and, under some interpretations, laws and punishments most of us would find horrifying.
Muslims have spent centuries arguing about what all of it means, which, come to think of it, sounds an awful lot like every other major religion.
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Judaism and Christianity have both gone through major reformations throughout their history. Islam has NOT.
The word Islam means “to submit”. Islam is not just a religion, but a political system as well, reminiscent of the Roman Catholic church historically in Europe, when the Pope was all powerfull . The fear of Islam lies in its foundational premise that it mandates submission or destruction. The concern is well founded in historical precedent, every time that Islam becomes the majority, Sharia becomes the mandate that is enforced on the populace. All you have to do is look at what is now happening in Europe where there are “no go zones” in neighborhoods where Islam is the majority. The United Kingdom now has multiple Sharia courts.
Moderate muslims are a minority worldwide, but the trend is that when an area becomes majority Muslim , radicalism inevitably ensues