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“Texas On My Mind”

“Texas On My Mind”

Last updated on: November 18, 2025 at 8:55 pm by Dan Peterson

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“Texas On My Mind” 2025-11-18T20:55:29-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The proposed Fairview Texas Temple, estimated at 30,742 square feet. (fair use from lds.org)

I was not pleased to see this in the New York Times: “Texas Governor Declares Muslim Civil Rights Group a ‘Terrorist Organization’: Gov. Greg Abbott said the state could now take steps to shut down the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The group said the declaration had no basis in fact or law.”

The group in question is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. While I haven’t followed them at all carefully, I’ve had some slight interactions with CAIR over the years. And, although I haven’t always agreed with the positions they’ve taken, I’m very far from persuaded that they are a terrorist organization. Moreover, I’ll need to see more evidence than I have seen that they have direct ties to Hamas. This declaration, though, can have very real consequences. It will, for instance, prohibit CAIR from acquiring land in Texas and will authorize the state’s attorney general “to sue to shut them down” in the state.

According to the Times article,

Anti-Muslim sentiment has been increasingly apparent in online discussions in Texas, and in brick-and mortar fights beyond the internet. At the start of the year, many Republican state leaders, including Mr. Abbott and the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, objected to a planned 400-acre residential development near Josephine, a town northeast of Dallas, that was designed to revolve around a new mosque. The proposed development, known as EPIC City, was organized by members of a suburban mosque in East Plano.

Since then, anti-Muslim sentiment has become more pronounced, especially after New Yorkers elected a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, to be the city’s next mayor.

“Islam is not compatible with Western civilization, period,” Bo French, a prominent Republican Party figure, recently posted on social media. Mr. French resigned as the party chairman in Fort Worth this month to run for statewide office.

Responding to overwhelming public clamor, I interrupt my quotation from the Times to mention that I will not be endorsing Bo French for any elective office. Now, though, back to the article:

In a radio interview on Tuesday, Mr. Abbott linked his declaration to other actions he has taken in recent months to respond to an outcry from some Republicans in Texas over the state’s growing Muslim population.

The governor also suggested that he was concerned about Muslim elected officials.

“The concern is high, especially when you see somebody like Mamdani get elected and the cataclysmic problems that’s going to cause,” he said. “We want to make sure that’s never going to happen.”

I worry about Zohran Mamdani because of his extreme anti-Israeli positions and because he’s a self-described “democratic socialist.” In other words, I’m concerned about his leftist politics and his misguided economics. Am I worried that he’s a Muslim? No. I’m not.

“We have freedom of religion; however, your religion cannot become a threat to our freedom,” Mr. Abbott said.

The governor’s declaration comes as the fight over EPIC City continues. Mr. Abbott has said the project, which has yet to break ground, was illegal, and he has directed several state agencies to investigate. The Trump administration also opened an investigation, then quietly ended it over the summer, saying the developers had pledged to abide by federal fair-housing laws.

Mr. Paxton said last month that he was still seeking to prosecute people involved in the development project over allegations of state and federal securities law violations. And Mr. Abbott said in his radio interview on Tuesday that the Texas Rangers [presumably not the baseball team!] were continuing to look into the project.

The developers have said that no laws have been broken.

This sort of thing demands real vigilance from those of us who believe in the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion. Do Governor Abbott and Attorney General Paxton have legitimate concerns? Maybe. But, thus far, I’m unconvinced. And I can’t help but think about the proposed Fairview Texas Temple.

Here’s my own personal proposal for a design of the Fairview Texas Temple that might satisfy local objections. In this design, the temple would be situated fifty feet below the surface of the building site. The entrance tunnel for the temple would open across the street, in the much more receptive town of Allen, Texas. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

A pair of interesting articles on the current status of religion and religious involvement in the United States:

“Less than half of American adults say religion is important: study”

“How politics and work are affecting women’s religious practice: Politics and work play more of a leading role than acknowledged in a public discourse focused almost entirely on gender roles”

The Buenos Aires Argentina Temple was dedicated in 1986. It will shortly be joined another tempe, downtown. (LDS Media Library)

Unfortunately, the flow of theistic evils never stops. Here’s yet another outrage that I’ve drawn from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

“Sharing the Savior’s Love at a Children’s Medical Center in Argentina: Elder Renlund visits Ricardo Gutiérrez Children’s Hospital in Buenos Aires, where the Church donated needed devices”

By the way, have you ever heard Bernard Shaw’s amusing comment about English spelling? Suppose, he says, that you’re a very good speaker of English who suddenly can’t quite remember how to spell the word fish. So you sound it out. First, you need an f sound. Like the one in cough. So gh-. And then you need an i sound, as in women. Thus, gho-. Finally, you need an sh sound, like the one in nation. Which gives you ghoti (aka fish)! Somebody, though, just can’t leave well enough alone. He wants to spell fisher (or maybe fissure?). Realizing that he needs an -er sound, he immediately thinks of the word colonel. And, thus, he arrives at ghotiolo, which is pronounced fisher.

A bilingual third-generation unit pertaining to me is learning to spell, and when this TGU encounters such anomalies, it has been trained to sing “English is weird! English is weird!” to the tune of the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. And, indeed, English is weird. Especially its orthography. It is, nonetheless, the preeminent international language. Which couldn’t help but catch the notice of an exceptionally noxious group of religious fanatics, who have decided to exploit it as yet another way to poison the world. I retrieved this from the Hitchens File:

“How EnglishConnect Is Opening Doors and Changing Lives: The Church provides the global program in more than 50 languages”

And this was filed nearby:

“First Meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Dedicated in Azerbaijan: Elder David A Bednar joined by top government, religious officials and Church members in opening of first building in Baku”

Happily, though, if religion disappears (as many hope and, umm, pray that it eventually will), such outrages will become a thing of the past. Either Our Savior the State will need to step in or these things will simply cease.

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Council on American-Islamic Relations

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