Let me know if you have any interest in this piece for Politics and Power:
The Hawaiian Senate on Wednesday passed a well-meaning but Constitutionally daft bill <http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2009/Bills/HCR100_HD1_.pdf> by which that state officially recognizes a particular religion - Islam, in this case - as holding certain positive philosophical and spiritual attributes, even going so far as to call on the citizenry to respect and emulate these particular attributes. This development should be of concern to all Americans of every creed or none.
HCR 100 proclaims September 24th to be Islam Day, citing this as the date when the Prophet Mohammad arrived on the outskirts of Madinah, thereby marking the birth of Islam. Not content with having thereby given itself the authority to proclaim particular historical figures to be religious prophets, the Hawaiian Senate went on to make further theological judgment calls by citing the common teachings Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism as further evidence of the religions overall grandeur. Thus it is that this bill violates both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution by implicitly stating that a particular religion is worthy of praise simply by virtue of its similarity to two other religions that happen to be popular among a great number of people. Hawaiis newly-encoded preference for a set of particular religious creeds is further made plain a bit later in the bills text when it is asserted that Islam, along with its monotheistic counterparts, holds that peace is a divine quality and necessary for collective human happiness. The State of Hawaii has thereby gotten into the messy and blatantly unconstitutional business of characterizing the philosophical nature of particular religions - and by doing so, it has inevitably insulted all of the others by omission.
In defense of Hawaii, its senate is not the first such body in the U.S. to step on the toes of the Constitution in an effort to recognize Islams contributions to the world; as HCR 100 notes, the U.S. Congress passed a similar measure in 1979, which is to say there is precedent for such nonsense. And, of course, there is yet another national bid in the works to codify respect for religion in general and the Judeo-Christianity in particular by way of H. Res. 397, which would establish American Spiritual Heritage Week in service to historical revisionism of the sort that seeks to remake our secular government as a Christian institution. Hawaii is simply falling prey to a misguided trend that we have seen before in many other states and on the national level as well.
Of course, HRC 100 and H. Res. 397 are driven by very different motivations. The latter is yet another attempt by Christian legislators to elevate religion in general and Christianity in particular to a status that they simply do not merit within the context of American jurisprudence, which explicitly forbids the government to elevate anything of the sort to any level at all; the former is merely intended to assure American Muslims that they are included within the American family, which is to say that it is an attempt to elevate Islam to the same level as Christianity and Judaism in the eyes of the state. But this, too, is misguided; in matters of religion, the state should be blind.
If Hawaiians or anyone else feel the need to reassure Muslims at home or abroad that they are not automatically enemies of the United States, there is a better way to go about this, and one that has the added bonus of promoting knowledge of our national history and secular origins - they can pass a bill in commemoration of the Treaty of Tripoli <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli> , which was passed unanimously by Congress in 1797 and signed into law by President John Adams in the same year, and which plainly states not only that our nation has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen [Muslims], but also that the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
Incidentally, the sponsors of the pro-Christian American Spiritual Heritage Week might want to read over the Treaty of Tripoli as well.