Monty Fritts, a radical Christian nationalist state legislator who is now running for governor, appeared on "The Todd Starnes Show" on Tuesday where he declared that, if elected, he will work to deny religious freedom to Muslims in the state.
Claiming that he has been "called" by God to run for governor, Fritts bragged this is campaign is giving him a "chance to uplift Christ as King everywhere I go."
"Some people are offended by that," Fritts said. "Better to be offended and repent than spend eternity in hell."
Starnes then complained that "taxpayers are footing the bill for Muslim schools" in the state and asked Fritts how he planned to address that.
"Well, one of the first things we need to do ... [is] declare CAIR—Council for American-Islamic Relations—the Muslim Brotherhood, and other of those what I think are enemies of the United States, both to be enemies and foreign terrorist organizations. I think that's a necessary step. I think that Islam is not a religion. It's a political movement, and it's a movement by force at the point of a spear or a weapon. And I think it's incongruent with our U.S. and Tennessee Constitution and I think we have first assert that fact."
When Starnes noted that doing so would appear to many to be an overt attack on religious liberty, Fritts insisted that it was nothing of the sort.
"Most take that from this bitter lie that has been told about a separation of church and state," Fritts said. "Many people point to the First Amendment. They forget that the first word in the First Amendment is 'Congress shall make no law.' Many are unread in our Tennessee constitution that asserts in Article 1, Section 3 that all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God—the God of the Bible. President Washington—General Washington—Thomas Jefferson; those weren't perfect people, but they did have a Christian worldview and if we allow that to be dissipated, if we allow ourselves to be silenced by the cancel culture, then what we're doing to our posterity is unacceptable."
Predictably, Fritts' claim that the Tennessee constitution only gives citizens the right to worship "the God of the Bible" and therefor other religious can be discriminated against is directly contradicted by what Article 1, Section 3 actually says:
That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience; that no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any minister against his consent; that no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience; and that no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship