A Religious Test Is Unconstitutional
The Constitution could hardly be clearer. Article VI, Clause 3 declares that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment applies that principle to state and local governments as well.
Yet the Constitution is no obstacle to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization whose hostility toward the United States and Israel is difficult to miss. The DSA has embraced what amounts to an ideological litmus test for political candidates—one that demands they declare their position on anti-Zionism and BDS.
As part of a questionnaire circulated to local Chicago candidates, the DSA asked political hopefuls whether they align with what it calls “DSA values.” The first two long-form questions ask: “Would you consider yourself an anti-Zionist?” and “Do you support Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, and its potential application on the municipal level?”
Why is the existence of Israel—and the Jewish people’s right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland—among the first things the DSA wants a candidate for local office to address?
What does any of this have to do with municipal government?
Absolutely nothing.
Candidates for local office should be judged on public safety, taxes, schools, infrastructure, housing, economic development, and the quality of life in their communities. They should not have to pass an ideological test concerning whether the world’s only Jewish state has a right to exist.
Yet that is what the DSA considers important enough to put at the very top of its candidate questionnaire.
Anti-Zionism, when it means opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, rejects the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination. When that principle is applied uniquely to Jews—when every other people is permitted to have a nation-state, but Jewish sovereignty is singled out for condemnation—it deserves scrutiny.
The DSA is one of the largest socialist organizations in the United States and counts members of Congress among its ranks. Its opposition to Israel is not some incidental footnote. It is woven deeply into its political worldview.
So why is Zionism so important to the DSA?
Why is the Jewish desire for national sovereignty singled out for such relentless condemnation? Why should a candidate for municipal office declare a position on Zionism when it has nothing to do with potholes, police departments, property taxes, schools, or any of the other issues for which local officials are elected?
I know what the answer is and so should you.
But I would very much like to hear the DSA explain why opposition to Jewish national independence has become a political litmus test. Imagine applying the same standard to any other nationality.
Would the DSA demand that candidates declare whether they oppose Ukrainian, Armenian, Greek, Irish, or any other people’s right to national self-determination? Would opposition to those national movements appear at the top of a municipal candidate questionnaire? Of course not.
It is Israel—and Israel alone—that receives this extraordinary mistreatment.
When an organization makes opposition to Jewish national sovereignty a measure of political acceptability, it is entirely legitimate to ask whether something deeper than ordinary political disagreement is driving the obsession.
Could it be antisemitism?
That, my friends, was a rhetorical question.
