A State Commission for One Religion

The Yarmouth Republican Town Committee opposes Senate Bill 2134, which would write into Massachusetts law a permanent commission of the Commonwealth organized around a single religion.

This is not an argument about Muslim citizens, who are our neighbors and are entitled to every protection the law affords every one of us. Nor is it an argument that anti-Muslim harassment isn’t real — it is, and it should be prosecuted like any other crime. It is an argument about whether the government of Massachusetts should build permanent institutions around religious belief, and about what happens the next time a faith community asks for the same thing.

Where the Bill Stands Right Now

S.2134 was filed in the 194th General Court by Sen. James B. Eldridge (Middlesex & Worcester) on January 17, 2025, with 14 petitioners. It was reported favorably out of committee on November 24, 2025, and has been before Senate Ways and Means since January 12, 2026.

A predecessor bill in the previous session died without action. This one did not. It is live legislation, and if enacted the commission stands up on December 1, 2026.

What It Creates

A new Section 71 of Chapter 3 of the General Laws establishing “a permanent commission on the status of people who practice Islam.” The word permanent is the bill’s own. Eleven appointed members — two from the Governor, one each from the Attorney General, the Speaker, and the Senate President, two from the State Secretary, and four from the House and Senate chairs of a single committee. A paid executive director. Offices. A fund held in an account at the Secretary of State’s office. And a standing channel into every agency in state government.

Its duties include advising the Legislature on pending bills, and this:

“[I]dentify and recommend qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government, including boards and commissions…” — Section 71(d)(5)

A permanent body of the Commonwealth, recommending people for public office by faith. Whatever else this bill is, that provision is not a small thing, and it is the one we would ask supporters to defend first.

Let’s Be Fair About What This Bill Is

You will hear that opponents are inventing an outrage. So let us put the strongest version of the other side on our own page, because our argument does not need us to hide it.

S.2134 is closely modeled on an existing Massachusetts statute. Chapter 3 already contains a commission on the status of women, and commissions for Asian American and Pacific Islander, Latino, African American, and other communities. Compare S.2134 to Section 68 — the Asian American and Pacific Islander Commission, on the books since 2006 — and the language is nearly identical. The clearinghouse role, the liaison role, the recommending of candidates for appointment, the annual report, the executive director: all of it is the existing template. The drafters changed the group and trimmed the membership.

And the bill does not require members to be Muslim. The standard is residents “who have demonstrated a commitment to the Muslim American community.” A non-Muslim scholar of religious discrimination would qualify. It is not a religious test for office in the ordinary sense, and we are not going to claim it is.

That candor is the whole point. Our objection is not that this commission has unusual powers. It has the same powers the others have. Our objection is that the template itself stops working the moment you apply it to a religion — because the Constitution treats religion differently from ethnicity, and it does so deliberately.

Why Religion Is Different — and It Isn’t Close

There is no provision of the United States Constitution forbidding the establishment of an ethnicity. There is one forbidding the establishment of a religion. That asymmetry is not a technicality; it is the entire reason the existing commissions are not precedent for this one.

The Supreme Court has been explicit about what that means between faiths:

“The clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” — Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228 (1982)

Under Larson, a law that prefers one denomination is suspect and must survive the most demanding review courts apply. And this is not old doctrine on the way out. On June 5, 2025, a unanimous Supreme Court — all nine justices, in an opinion by Justice Sotomayor — applied that exact rule in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, striking down a state scheme that treated religious groups differently from one another.

Nine to nothing. There is no serious argument that denominational neutrality is a partisan theory or a relic.

Massachusetts Spent Fifty Years Getting Religion Out of Its Government

To understand how far S.2134 turns the wheel, look at what the Commonwealth had to do to itself to get here.

When Massachusetts adopted its constitution in 1780, you could not hold office in this state without declaring your religion. The oath in Chapter VI required every officeholder to say:

“I, A. B., do declare, that I believe the Christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth…”

A religious test, written into the constitution of the Commonwealth, required of every senator and every representative.

Massachusetts struck it in 1821. Amendment Article VI threw out the belief declaration and replaced both original oaths with a single secular sentence — the same one Sen. Eldridge and all 199 of his colleagues swear at the start of every session, administered by the Governor:

“I, A. B., do solemnly swear, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and will support the constitution thereof. So help me God.”

Allegiance to the Commonwealth. Support for its constitution. Not one word about what you believe. Anyone who objects to swearing may affirm instead.

Twelve years later, in 1833, Massachusetts finished the job — the last state in the union to disestablish religion.

That is the direction of travel: 1780 to 1833, half a century of the Commonwealth methodically removing religion from the machinery of its own government. Not because anyone here was hostile to faith — this state was founded by people who crossed an ocean for it — but because they learned what happens when government starts sorting citizens by creed.

S.2134 is the first serious proposal in two centuries to point that wheel the other way.

We want to be precise about what we are and are not saying. This bill does not change anyone’s oath, and it does not impose a religious test on the commission’s own members — a non-Muslim can satisfy its membership standard, and we said so above. The oath is not a rule S.2134 breaks. It is a principle S.2134 abandons.

Except in one place. Section 71(d)(5) directs the commission to identify and recommend “qualified American Muslims for appointive positions at all levels of government.” That is a state body sorting candidates for other public offices by faith — and that is precisely the clause the Freedom From Religion Foundation flagged under Article VI of the United States Constitution, which provides that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust.”

Massachusetts deleted its religious test for office in 1821. This bill asks the Commonwealth to fund a permanent commission whose job description includes applying one.

Massachusetts Says It Even More Plainly

Massachusetts was the last state in the union to disestablish religion, and when it finally did so in 1833 it wrote the rule into the Constitution in words that leave little room:

“[N]o subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.” — Amendment Article XI, Constitution of the Commonwealth

The Supreme Judicial Court has separately confirmed that the Massachusetts Constitution “provides greater protections against the establishment of religion than the establishment clause of the First Amendment” (Caplan v. Town of Acton, 479 Mass. 69 (2018)).

So the question for every senator voting on this bill is a Massachusetts question, asked under a Massachusetts constitution that is stricter than the federal one: when the Commonwealth builds a permanent, salaried institution for one faith and no other, has it established a subordination of every other denomination to that one?

The Question Nobody Has Answered

Here is the part supporters have never addressed, and it is not a rhetorical trick — it is the precise defect that has sunk laws like this before.

S.2134 names one faith. It contains no standard whatsoever — no population threshold, no finding of documented discrimination, no criteria of any kind — under which any other faith community could obtain the same body. Whether Catholics, Jews, evangelicals, Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists ever get one would rest entirely on the discretion of some future Legislature, deciding faith by faith, one at a time.

The Supreme Court has held that this is exactly what the Constitution forbids. Striking down a New York law that drew a public school district around one religious community, the Court wrote:

“Because the religious community of Kiryas Joel did not receive its new governmental authority simply as one of many communities eligible for equal treatment under a general law, we have no assurance that the next similarly situated group seeking a school district of its own will receive one.” — Board of Education of Kiryas Joel v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994)

The absence of a neutral rule for the next group was itself the constitutional violation. New York then tried twice more, rewriting the law in facially general terms, and its highest court struck down both attempts as favoritism toward one religious community.

There is an honest version of this bill: a general commission on the status of religious minorities, open to any faith community meeting neutral criteria. Nobody filed that bill. The fact that nobody filed it is not an oversight — it is the argument.

We are not asking for a commission of our own. We are asking the Commonwealth to say what its principle is.

America Has Tried Religious Boards Before. It Went Badly.

This is not a new experiment, and the history is not ambiguous.

For decades, New York and New Jersey each ran a state board of rabbis — official advisory bodies attached to state government to supervise kosher-food enforcement. Reasonable purpose. Real constituency. Genuine expertise.

Courts struck them both down. New Jersey’s scheme fell in the state Supreme Court in 1992. New York’s fell in federal court, and the ruling was upheld on appeal. In each case the constitutional problem was the same one S.2134 has: the state had fused a religious body into the machinery of government.

And look at how New York fixed it. The Legislature passed a replacement kosher law in 2004 that deliberately contains no religious advisory board at all — and that version was upheld.

The lesson is not subtle. When American states have attached religious advisory bodies to their governments, the courts have removed them, and the legislative repair has been to take the board out. Massachusetts is proposing to put one in.

We note that this precedent involves Jewish boards rather than Muslim ones, and we note it deliberately. The principle here has nothing to do with which faith is involved. It has never had anything to do with which faith is involved. That is the entire point.

Nobody Else Has Done This

Here is what a review of state law turns up.

We could not find a single state with a statutory commission for Jewish residents. Or Sikh. Or Hindu. Or Christian. Or Buddhist. States have dozens of commissions for ethnic and national-origin communities — African American, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, South Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, tribal. We found none for a faith.

The one we did find is Illinois, which created a Muslim American Advisory Council in 2017. If someone can point us to another, we will say so on this page.

And Illinois itself drew the line we are asking Massachusetts to draw. When that same legislature created its South Asian American Advisory Council, it wrote into the statute that appointees must be diverse in faith — building an ethnic body on purpose, and refusing to build a religious one. The Illinois General Assembly understood the difference between ancestry and belief well enough to legislate it.

So the honest description of S.2134 is this: Massachusetts would become the second state in the union to write a single-faith commission into its permanent code — while every other identity commission in America, in every state, is built on ancestry, national origin, sex, or tribal sovereignty.

That is not a slippery-slope worry. That is the ground the Commonwealth is being asked to break.

Two Honest Answers to Two Fair Objections

“Illinois has had one since 2015 and no court has struck it down.” True. Illinois created a Muslim American Advisory Council in 2015 and it has never been successfully challenged. But unchallenged is not the same as upheld. No court has ruled on it because it is genuinely difficult for any ordinary citizen to get into court over an advisory body — nobody is taxed, denied, or coerced in a way that gets a case heard. Legal silence here reflects the courthouse door, not a verdict. And in any event, our Legislature does not have to wait to be sued to do the right thing. Constitutionality is the floor, not the goal.

“American Muslims are an ethnic community as much as a religious one.” There is something to this, and courts have recognized ethno-religious communities before. But the drafters chose their own words: the commission is for “people who practice Islam.” Not a nationality. Not an ancestry. A practice. They picked the one formulation that is defined by belief, and they should be held to it.

“Massachusetts already has a commission on antisemitism — so where were you?” A fair shot, and the honest answer is that the two are not the same thing. The antisemitism commission is defined by a form of discrimination, not by a religious constituency — its subject is the conduct, not the congregation. And it is a special commission created through the budget, not a permanent body written into Chapter 3 of the General Laws with a paid director and a standing account.

That distinction is the whole argument in miniature. A state may study and combat a form of hatred. That is law enforcement and civil rights, and every citizen benefits from it. Building a permanent institution around the adherents of one faith is a different act, and it is the one the Constitution has something to say about.

If the Legislature’s concern is anti-Muslim discrimination — and it is a real concern — then the antisemitism commission is the model that is already sitting there: define the body by the discrimination, not by the denomination. That bill we would not be fighting.

Where We Stand

• Equal protection, not special standing. Every citizen of the Commonwealth is entitled to the same protection of the laws. None is entitled to a permanent commission, a paid director, and a statutory seat advising the Legislature.
• Denominational neutrality is not negotiable. The state may not rank faiths — not by favoring one, and not by leaving every other one to petition for equal treatment.
• Hate crimes are already crimes. Violence and harassment against anyone in Massachusetts is illegal today and should be prosecuted vigorously, whoever the target is. That work does not require a permanent bureaucracy built around one faith.
• If the Commonwealth wants to act, act neutrally. A commission on religious liberty and religious discrimination, open to every faith on the same terms, would raise none of these objections. We would support it.
• Permanent means permanent. A body created in Chapter 3 does not sunset, does not face the voters, and does not go away when the problem it was created to study does.

It Is Not Just Us Saying This

Before anyone tells you this objection is anti-Muslim, consider who else is making it.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation — a secular organization that spends most of its existence suing to keep Christian prayer and Christian monuments out of government — opposes this bill. Their senior policy counsel, while stating plainly that anti-Muslim bigotry is real and serious, wrote that the duty to recommend people for appointment “shows a clear denominational preference for public office, raising serious concerns under the First Amendment and Article VI” — the clause forbidding religious tests for public office. They also warned that the bill uses the word “Islamophobia” without ever defining it, which risks sweeping in protected criticism of a religion alongside genuine animus.

That is not a conservative group. That is not a religious group. It is an organization that exists to enforce the separation of church and state, and it looked at this bill and saw the same problem we see.

When the people who sue over nativity scenes and the people who put up nativity scenes reach the same conclusion about a bill, the problem is the bill.

How Our Delegation Stands

Fourteen legislators put their names on S.2134 as cosponsors. Not one of them represents Cape Cod or the Islands.

The cosponsors are the sponsor himself and eleven other senators, plus two House members from Lowell and Salem.

Yarmouth’s own legislators are not among them. Not Rep. Christopher Flanagan (1st Barnstable), not Rep. Kip Diggs (2nd Barnstable), and not Sen. Julian Cyr, who represents Yarmouth in the Cape & Islands district and who will be one of the forty votes if this bill reaches the Senate floor.

That is worth knowing, and it cuts both ways: none of them has endorsed this bill — and none of them has opposed it either. As far as the public record shows, they have said nothing at all.

The bill is now in Senate Ways and Means. It cleared its committee. It is one procedural step from a floor vote, further than any version has ever gotten. Silence at this stage is a decision.

Take Action

S.2134 is in Senate Ways and Means now. Bills die in Ways and Means all the time — usually because legislators hear from the people they represent.

In Yarmouth, that means Sen. Julian Cyr (Cape & Islands), and Rep. Christopher Flanagan or Rep. Kip Diggs depending on your precinct. Sen. Cyr is the one who matters most here — the bill is in the Senate, and he is one of forty votes.

Ask him one question: will you vote against S.2134, and if not, what is the principle under which you would tell the next faith community no?

That question has no good answer, which is why it is the one to ask.

Then tell us what he said. Get in touch here — we are keeping a public record of where each of them stands.

Read it yourself. We have quoted S.2134 directly throughout, and we have put the other side’s best arguments on this page rather than hiding them. The full text is on the Legislature’s own site — malegislature.gov/Bills/194/S2134. Read it and reach your own conclusion.