First Amendment includes more than the press

Thoughts turned to the First Amendment on World Press Freedom Day May 3, when Reporters Without Borders announced that the United States’ global rank in nations’ levels of press freedom fell to its lowest ever: 64^th out of 180 countries – down seven places in a year. (The U.S. was 17^th out of 139 in 2002.)

Of course, the First Amendment is about more than the press. (In a college press law class, we used the mnemonic device “GRASP,” for rights tied to Grievance, Religion, Assembly, Speech and Press.)

Religion is increasingly under fire, in unusual ways.

A few days before World Press Freedom Day, Stateline news reported a disturbing revival of anti-Islam attacks by Republican candidates as midterm-election campaigns get going, “a strategy aimed at energizing voters by claiming without evidence that Muslim culture and religious tenets threaten American political values,” said journalist Anna Claire Vollers.

MAGA politicians have made Muslims a target in their fight to hang onto power. (Muslims say the rhetoric is misleading and misrepresents Islam’s values – and threatens their faith and its adherents.)

It’s a far cry from 25 years ago, when days after Sept. 11’s terror attacks GOP President George W. Bush visited a Washington, D.C., mosque and met with Muslim leaders, declaring “Islam is peace” and condemning retaliation against Muslim Americans.

Today, even the conservative Cato Institute scoffs at candidates’ shameless tactic.

“To think that American Muslims – which make 1% of the whole population – can enforce Shariah or force it on other people, that’s a very exaggerated claim,” said Mustafa Akyol, a Cato researcher who’s Muslim.

Explicit disrespect and outright attacks on the First Amendment’s first point – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” – goes beyond Muslims and the troubling resurgence of antisemitism..

In the Southwest, President Trump’s expansion of the border wall damaged a rare Native American site in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in the desert near Mexico. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an elder of the Hia-ced O’odham Indigenous people, said the site held special significance for Native Americans.

“If someone came to Washington and started destroying all the different sites that people in the United States revere, it’s the same thing for us,” she told the Washington Post.

Some faiths are not accepting marginalization by powerful political interests.

A coalition of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others is suing the Trump administration over its White House Religious Liberty Commission. They say it’s illegally skewed toward evangelical Christians, plus one Orthodox Jewish rabbi.

Represented by lawyers from Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Democracy Forward organization, the suit cites the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, which says all such government panels should reflect varied viewpoints and competing ideas.

The Religious Liberty Commission, which meets behind closed doors at the new Museum of the Bible near the U.S. Capitol, doesn’t have variety and competition, the coalition says, They want judges to order its proceedings opened up and minutes published as the law requires, and that any future report to note that the commission was illegally tilted.

The suit also draws on the U.S. Constitution and U.S. history. From before the American Revolution, there was no “established church,” unlike Great Britain’s Church of England. Mark Gruenberg of Press Associates Union News Service writes, “Most New England pilgrims were Protestant dissenters. Roman Catholics founded Maryland. Quakers established Pennsylvania. Jews first arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) in the 1600s, which was already inhabited by members of the Dutch Reformed Church. White Baptists, then persecuted in Europe, were prevalent in the deep South. And Roger Williams established freedom for all religions in Rhode Island.”

Unlike some conservatives’ recent rewrites of history, the Founders were varied, too, according to the suit, which quotes George Washington’s letters about religious freedom to various denominations. The most famous Washington letter was in 1790 to the elders of Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, where he wrote the government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The case challenges the composition and secrecy of the Religious Liberty Commission, which was supposed to defend religious liberty for all Americans but does not.

“All members of the commission advocate for increased religiosity, and specifically their brand of Judeo-Christian religiosity, in public life. Members promoted the primacy of a Judeo-Christian world view in the public sphere, advocated for discrimination against minority groups under the guise of ‘religious liberty,’ and otherwise supported policies that threaten religious freedom for all those who do not conform to their particular worldview.”

Ria Chakrabarty of Hindus for Human Rights commented, “Religious liberty means religious liberty for everyone, not just one faith community. By stacking this Religious Liberty Commission with a narrow set of voices and hiding the commission’s work from the public eye, the Trump administration is evading the transparency and balance that federal law requires. Hindus for Human Rights is proud to stand with our multifaith partners to defend a pluralistic democracy where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and nonreligious people all belong as equals.”

Early in the U.S. war on Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Americans to “pray for victory in the name of Jesus Christ.”

That irked Pope Leo XIV. The Chicagoland native, Catholicism’s first U.S.-born Pope, said the Christian mission “has often been distorted by a desire for domination.”