Islam is not a religion and now is a good time to start driving that point home. Islam is using our constitution for protection just like al quida uses girls and children for human shields. The fight is not about what our constitution means, but about what Islam really is, as opposed to what they claim it is.
Until we meet this head on and squash it, they will effectively use the constitution to squash us, aided by those that miss the point.
EDIT:
Let me point out one more thing:
Anti-Christians threaten our churches all the time with the power to take away our tax status if we just voice political opinions in our sermons,
whereas,
Islams don't just preach things in their sermons, no, they go out and actually kill people for their cause, and use their sermons to raise up a generation of suicide bombers.
So, since it has become acceptable in our society to hammer Christian churches with the threat of losing its no-tax status for just making mere political statements, then to be fair and balanced, it should be ok for neighborhoods to disallow the building of mosques and keep the number of suicide bombers down to a bare minimum.
As long as islam is recognized as a religion by the IRS (and it is) then it will be pretty tough to successfully argue otherwise.
Yes, individual churches routinely lose their tax exempt status for crossing the line and yes, it is usually (non-black) Christian churches that fall victim to these rulings. But I have yet to see an instance where an entire religion loses its tax exempt status let alone its recognition by the state as a religion.
I believe that the threshold for state recognition of a belief system (or whatever you want to call it) as a religion is purposefully set rather low so that the state is rightfully not in the business of picking winners or losers. There are, of course, obvious exceptions to that such as the person who decides to declare himself the pope of his own made up church in order to dodge income taxes.
So far the vast majority of murderous/terrorist elements of islam have largely left the American homeland alone. That is primarily due to the diligence of the FBI, CIA, NSA and other elements put into place by GWB following the September 11, 2001 attacks. It's also due to the stupidity and lack of creative thinking in the terrorist mind. And luck. Or Providence.
You said, "Islams don't just preach things in their sermons, no, they go out and actually kill people for their cause, and use their sermons to raise up a generation of suicide bombers," and that is true but it isn't true here in America. Not yet. This would be the religious equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded room for the purpose of causing a panic. It would cross the line of what is protected speech and protected religious activity (such as the above mentioned human sacrifice example). But unless it was happening in the majority of mosques across the country there is little chance, even then, that the
entire islamic religion/belief system/political ideology could be successfully indicted.
There will be strong resistance toward any such move by a majority of Americans barring a major and/or sustained terrorist attack on the country. That's just the way we are. The internment of the Japanese during WWII was, in my opinion, entirely justified based on the destruction of Pearl Harbor and the Pacific fleet. We will, I am afraid, have to suffer some other such attack before islam can be successfully stripped of its religious status.
Unfortunately this is one of the problems of living in a free society governed by a Constitutional rule book.
