On September 10, 2001, two of the men who would murder thousands of Americans the following morning spent part of their final hours preparing themselves for what they believed was a religious act.
According to FBI findings later documented by The Harvard Crimson, Hamza and Ahmed al-Ghamdi followed a detailed spiritual-preparation routine in their Boston-area hotel room. They shaved their bodies, emptied bottles of lotion, and performed wudu, the ritual Islamic ablution required before prayer. The instructions given to the hijackers reportedly included a command not to leave their lodging without first performing ablution.
Had they waited another 25 years, the folks at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport might have saved them the trouble.
DFW is now preparing to install dedicated Islamic foot-washing stations in its airport restrooms, reportedly at a cost of roughly $300,000, so Muslim travelers can perform wudu before their flights.
The project is privately funded, but that's largely irrelevant to the fundamental question that deserves an answer from our public institutions:
When does religious accommodation become religious preference?
This wudu issue came up at the Indianapolis International Airport several years ago after numerous complaints that Muslim taxi drivers were performing the ritual in the public restroom sinks. Besides the obvious sanitation concern, there was also a public safety nuisance associated with the wet counters and floors that were left behind.
Rather than tell the drivers they had to find a different place to complete their ritual, or forbid them access to the facilities ostensibly created for the traveling public, Indianapolis International catered to the drivers and built the very kind of stations DFW now looks to construct.
But there's a significant difference between protecting someone's freedom to practice a religion and taking responsibility for facilitating every practical demand that religion places upon its adherents.
That distinction matters because religious practices are not limited to wudu.
Every major religion has practices, rituals, dietary requirements, sacred observances and physical accommodations that may be important to its adherents. Once the governing principle becomes, "If your religion requires it, a public institution should provide the necessary infrastructure," we've created a standard that will eventually become impossible to administer consistently.
What happens when another religious community requests specialized facilities for one of its own rituals?
What determines whether that request is reasonable?
How much inconvenience must the institution absorb?
How much money is appropriate?
How much space should be devoted to it?
Perhaps most importantly, what neutral principle allows us to answer those questions without simply counting which religious group has the greatest political influence at the moment?
America has historically protected religious practice precisely because it recognizes that human beings possess consciences that government shouldn't control.
But protecting someone's religious liberty does not require government to become the concierge for his religion.
If I am a Christian traveling through DFW and want to pray before boarding my flight, I should be free to find a quiet place and pray. If I want to read my Bible, nobody should stop me. If I have a religious practice that can be performed using the ordinary facilities available to everyone else, I should be free to perform it.
The same principle should apply to Muslims.
But the assumption that accommodation itself is the highest expression of tolerance is deeply misguided. Sometimes accommodation is perfectly reasonable. Sometimes it is unnecessary.
And sometimes, particularly when public institutions begin designing permanent facilities around the unique requirements of a particular faith, we ought to ask whether we've crossed from protecting religious freedom into institutional preference.
None of us want a future in which every public institution is expected to redesign itself around the particular demands of the religious or ideological constituency that is most successful at making its case.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
