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A government willing to target religion anywhere is a threat to target it everywhere. The president's new executive order is less sweeping than his first one, but it remains clearly (if more subtly) aimed at Muslims.
Does the "war on terror" justify legal restrictions on Muslim Americans and Muslim immigrants to the United States? This is a pressing question for the entire country, but especially for Utah, a state built by believers fleeing violent persecution.
The First Amendment prohibits government from discriminating on the basis of religion, and the Fourteenth Amendment forbids discrimination on the basis of race and national origin. These sound like powerful protections, but they promise more than they deliver, especially in times of national fear and uncertainty. The government is constitutionally authorized to discriminate on the basis of religion, race and national origin, if discrimination is necessary to protect a "compelling" or exceptionally important interest.
What government business would be so important that it would authorize discrimination? "War," "national security," "terrorism" — these are the loopholes in our constitutional liberties, and the very justifications the administration is now using to justify restrictions on Muslim immigration.
The federal government used Pearl Harbor and World War II as justification for imprisoning 80,000 Japanese American citizens — not citizens of Japan, though 45,000 of them were imprisoned, too, but American citizens born in the United States.
"National security" was the justification for wiretapping the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders during the Cold War, because of equally unfounded fears that the civil-rights movement was a communist front.
And "terrorism" was the justification for the federal government to arrest and hold a thousand American Muslims in the wake of 9/11 without any form of due process. The average detention period was 10 weeks, though some were held as long as eight months — shackled, strip-searched and jailed without charges, without counsel, without communication with their families.
The position of Muslims in American society remains tenuous, not so different from that of Latter-day Saints when Utah became a state. Muslim Americans are frequent targets of private discrimination and government profiling. Forty percent of Americans even support forcing Muslims to register with the government so law enforcement can track their movements and monitor their activities. We elected a president who campaigned on anti-Muslim policies, including a national Muslim registry, and he is now making good his campaign promises. There is no reason to believe he will stop with restrictions on Muslim immigration.
Religious discrimination always starts small, and always seems reasonable. After all, in a United States under threat of terrorist attacks inspired by al-Qaeda and ISIS, what could make more sense than excluding Muslims? But pluralist democracy is fragile. The ability of people of vastly different racial, ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds to live together peacefully is an ongoing experiment. The world is littered with its failures.
To take only one: Lebanon was once a stable pluralist democracy, the "Switzerland of the Middle East," held out as a model for multi-ethnic and other pluralist nations. In the 1970s an accumulation of seemingly unrelated events destabilized the government and plunged the country into a Christian-Muslim civil war that lasted 15 years. No one compares Lebanon to Switzerland anymore.
My father's grandparents immigrated from Germany, and my mother from eastern Canada. They were poor, but in the United States they were able to build something for their children. That's why people have always come here, and why they continue to come here.
We should be proud of our country, and yet humble about its history. We have our own failures — two centuries of slavery; generations of discrimination against African Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans and other minority Americans; violent persecutions of Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious minorities, including an anti-Semitism that just won't go away. And now discrimination against Muslims.
Singling out Muslims and any religious minority for burdens we would not tolerate for ourselves could begin to unravel our state and our country and what we aspire to be. A government willing to target any religion is a threat to target all religions. Our pluralist democracy is fragile, too, and we must be vigilant in preserving it.
Frederick Mark Gedicks is Guy Anderson Chair and Professor of Law at BYU Law School. These views are based on a talk given at the University of Utah during Holocaust Remembrance Week and do not necessarily represent those of BYU or its sponsoring church.