Fischer said that the First Amendment is a privilege, not a right, for Muslim Americans. “Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam,” Fischer wrote on his Renew America blog March 24.
“The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity. They were making no effort to give special protections to Islam. Quite the contrary,” Fischer wrote. “Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.”
Fischer called Islam a “treasonous ideology” and added that “from a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America. They have that privilege at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked.”
Fischer, who is also anti-gay, has previously called for the US to have “no more mosques, period,” because “every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruitment center for jihad.” He’s also suggested that America should “handle Muslims just like we handle neo-Nazis.”
Fischer is a polarizing and highly controversial figure. He has stated that all Muslims should be deported, that Muslims should be banned from serving in the military, that inbreeding was making Muslims stupid and violent, that a whale at Sea World should have been stoned to death for killing its trainer and that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.
Yet he continues to be an important political figure, as his show frequently hosts conservative politicians, including potential 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and actual 2012 candidate Tim Pawlenty, both of whom are Republican.