Thursday, August 09th, 2012, by Blake Farmer
It’s getting tougher to be a Republican in Tennessee while also fully accepting the practice of Islam.
An incumbent in the U.S. House found herself on the defensive after being called soft on Sharia law, and the governor has been forced to explain why he hired a Muslim as part of a growing public push to raise suspicions of Islam.
“By stopping this now, we’re going to save ourselves a lot of difficulty in the future,” says Lee Douglas, a dentist in Brentwood who sees what he calls an “infiltration” of Islam in federal and state government.
Douglas points to the appointment of Samar Ali to work in Tennessee’s economic development office. He and others drafted a resolution criticizing the governor and making a case that Islam is bent on world domination.
A version of the document has been signed by a growing list of county-level Republican executive committees, including the state’s wealthiest and arguably most influential GOP stronghold of Williamson County.
Douglas uses the term Sharia, laws outlined in Muslim holy books, almost interchangeably with the religion itself.
He says the government should be showing deference to the religion on which the country was founded – Christianity. Instead, Douglas sees the U.S. Justice Department going to bat for Muslims, who make up one percent of the state and the U.S. as a whole.
Federal courts intervened in a lawsuit that attempted to keep the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro from opening.
