The view from the front window today is beautiful: only very high, wispy clouds hanging in an almost windless afternoon that is colder than it looks, but so much better than the three days of real winter we just had, and which I expect will complete our annual allotment here in southeast Texas. Then, it was the very definition of dreary when I looked through the glass, as it was again last evening when I did a double-take looking into my true window on the world, the television.
Since the party primaries for this coming November’s statewide elections in Texas are held in March, we’ve been blistered by white-hot MAGA-flavored political ads on TV for months already. I don’t rush to mute these ads (like I do the ones when a particular furniture salesman shouts at me) since I’ve mostly learned to ignore them. Mostly. But this line broke through the noise:
“Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.”
So said Aaron Reitz, a candidate in the Republican primary for Texas attorney general. Never been elected before, but not a fringe guy: a Phi Beta Kappa from Texas A&M University, Marine Corps veteran deployed to Afghanistan some 15 years ago, then a deputy state attorney general (while also being a campaign adviser to his boss’ re-election campaign; that doesn’t seem quite kosher), then chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz, and then confirmed by the Senate last March for a job as an assistant U.S. attorney general. A job he resigned less than three months later to run for AG back home. Yep, just three months.
Now, anti-Muslim bigotry is cynically worn as a badge of honor among many Texas Republicans these days. Last year the governor declared that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations are foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations, and this year the Republicans in the U.S. Senate race in Texas can’t stop finding new ways to make it clear they are anti-Muslim. As GOP consultant Vinny Minchillo put it for Politico, “The Muslim community is the boogeyman for this cycle….One hundred percent this message works — there’s no question about it. This has been polled up one side and down the other, and with Texas Republican primary voters, it works. It is a thing they are legitimately scared of.”
But my instinctive reaction to the Reitz ad was that this is different: no cutesy dog whistle sending a clear message only to those who own the decoder ring. He didn’t blast the individual Muslims who’ve committed acts of terror in Western nations, he didn’t accuse all Muslims of hating America, he didn’t even nonsensically claim – as Greg Abbott and others have – that Muslims in Texas are trying to build towns where only Muslims can buy property and their religious law will supersede Texas law, although he did do that later in the ad. No, he relied on some unspecified religious and civilizational authority to proudly proclaim, as if there was ever any real doubt, that “Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.” Without specifying why, of course. Perhaps we can construe that he feels Muslims do not conform to the (unspecified) “Christian values” which he promises to defend from the Muslim “invasion” that has been supported by “politicians.” (Do you wonder if the Christian value of recognizing that others may find their own path to God is one of the Christian values he’ll defend?)
That’s some pretty assertive, take-no-prisoners religious bigotry. And just the dreary worldview that Christian nationalists – who by definition reject the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty for all in the United States – are selling. Please, don’t buy it.
HEY, IT'S PAT RYAN'S BLOG! 
Thank you for spotlighting the recent television advertisement for Aaron Reitz as he campaigns to follow Ken Paxton as the next Texas Attorney General (TAG). Your post challenges us to ask what we should expect from our candidates to help us decide whether he, or any candidate, should be elected.
Mr. Reitz’s television ad states:
“Islam is not compatible with Western civilization…Politicians have imported millions of Muslims into our country. The result is more terrorism, more crime, and they even want their own illegal cities in Texas to impose Sharia law. Not on my watch.”
Let’s see whether his own words stand or fall on their own.
Should we expect more from a campaign ad for Mr. Reitz or any other candidate? He, like any other candidate, prefers catchy phrases and slogans to try to catch our attention. We, as voters, like that too. Yet we should want to know how a candidate’s beliefs show that the candidate is qualified to perform the elected duties or whether the candidate will just seek to impose an agenda divorced from the elected duties. We should reject when Mr. Reitz, or any candidate, makes uncritical, base, false or dehumanizing tropes to try to justify an agenda-driven administration.
Let’s chat about the duties of the TAG. The official website of Ken Paxton, the current TAG, defines the “Duties and Responsibilities of the Office of the Attorney General” and states that the TAG “… is the lawyer for the State of Texas and is charged by the Texas Constitution to: defend the laws and the Constitution of the State of Texas[,] represent the State in litigation[, and] approve bond issues….” Section 1 of the Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution clarifies that “… Texas is a free and independent State, subject only to the Constitution of the United States ….”
So, Mr. Reitz, consequently, would be charged, if elected the TAG, with defending the bedrock text of the U.S. and Texas Constitutions, including, among other laws, the core integrated protections of religious worship and non-establishment of religion:
— the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Sections 1, 3a, 6 and 6a of the Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution, more robustly, protect a person’s or group’s right to practice Islam or any other religion freely according to the dictates of that person’s or member’s conscience with no preference given to any religious society or mode of worship; and
— Section 6 of the Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution, in turn, compels the Texas Legislature to pass such laws as may be necessary to protect equally every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its mode of public worship.
The peaceable practice of Islam is not only compatible with these constitutional principles, but it is mandated by them. Mr. Reitz, if elected the TAG, must protect these principles. He does not need to reference Western Civilization to do so (no matter how Western Civilization is defined – which he conveniently does not do). But if he had to reference Western Civilization, then he must note that the rule of law equates to Western Civilization, as the rule of law, in its main part, derives from western European intellectual, religious, legal, moral and other cultural traditions from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. Thereby, Islam is compatible with the rule of law and hence with Western Civilization.
Mr. Reitz should not try to deflect from this conclusion. He further should not try to create straw men characterizations to try to rewrite the text of the fundamental rule of law.
Let’s next chat about the practice of Islam in Texas. The practice of Islam in Texas has not been, and is not, arbitrary, capricious, strange or unfathomable (if that even mattered which it does not under the constitutional protections). Nonetheless, it is a form of Abrahamic religion just like the sister Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Christianity. It fits into the same complex mosaic of secular-religious affairs, in a congruent way with other religions, Christian, Jewish or other, with varying respective collaborative or competitive degrees of religious community and antagonism on religious grounds and of the predominance of the secular over the religious. This all occurred within the development of Western Civilization.
Let’s finally chat about some key historical events and the lessons we should have learned. Islamic, Christian and other groups have allied together and have attacked each other. Each religion has been used for good and for harm. Christians and Muslims, even during open hot warfare, did co-exist and prosper, did engage in trade and diplomacy, and did interchange equally to help develop the ancient Greco-Roman, mathematical, scientific, and medical traditions that comprise Western Civilization. Islam has been an integral part of the development of Western Civilization.
Let’s answer the opening questions. We should expect more from Mr. Reitz than his uncritical, base, false, agenda-driven or dehumanizing tropes. We should find that he has not shown the character or deliberation necessary to be a good TAG. We cannot dismiss him as just being another politician or just that all politicians do what he does. We must demand more from all politicians. We must hold all candidates and elected or appointed officials accountable for what they say to get elected.
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