Is AliKhan a Danger to Religious Freedom?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns religious freedom. According to Virginia Allen at The Daily Signal, The U.S. Senate will soon have the opportunity to vote on the nomination of D.C. Judge Loren AliKhan to the bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. AliKhan was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by a vote of 11-10 – strictly along party lines last week. 

The vote moves the nomination of AliKhan to a vote by the full Senate despite being opposed by “a coalition of more than a dozen legal and policy organizations urging senators to vote against her confirmation.”

“During her short 11 years as a litigator, she has developed a remarkably long record of advocacy against religious freedom,” reads a coalition letter sent to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and to Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., the panel’s ranking member. All of the Democrats on the committee voted in AliKhan’s favor, while all the Republicans opposed her confirmation.

“While we recognize all attorneys must represent the best interest of their clients, each attorney is at liberty to determine which arguments to use,” the letter continues. “The courts have continuously rejected her discriminative arguments against people of faith and their houses of worship, and faith-based organizations.” …

The most “egregious” example of AliKhan’s hostility to religious freedom, according to the coalition letter, was demonstrated by her arguments that “houses of worship – meeting outdoors, masked and socially distanced – pose a greater threat to the COVID-19 pandemic than the allowed city-wide protests.”

Arguing before the D.C. District Court, AliKhan, according to the letter, “chose not to bring in a medical expert to support her claims, instead she brought in a Ph.D. in Poli-Science. He asserted that the risk of spreading COVID-19 is higher for events where people are standing (for a church service) than where they are moving (for a protest).”

The Senate is expected to vote on AliKhan’s nomination later this month.

Since judges carry a lot of weight as they rule from the bench, Americans should be leery of this particular nominee. Hopefully, there will be some Democrats in the Senate that will vote against her nomination.