At two of Texas' biggest airports, a quiet accommodation for Muslim travelers has become the latest political flash point. Gov. Greg Abbott has asked the federal Department of Transportation to investigate wudu washing stations at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental and Dallas-Fort Worth International, arguing that facilities designed around one faith amount to discrimination against everyone else and warning he'll review grants "to any local governmental entities involved in these schemes," reports the Washington Post. "Just as the government cannot favor the secular over the sacred, it also cannot favor one religious view over all other," Abbott said on Friday, per Chron.com.
Muslim leaders and legal scholars counter that the stations—used for ritual washing before prayer and increasingly common in major US hubs—are a basic religious accommodation, not preferential treatment, and that rhetoric like Abbott's fuels Islamophobia, per the Post. They frame Abbott's move as part of a broader Republican push singling out Islam, pointing to his support for mandatory Ten Commandments displays in classrooms and his efforts to label the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a major Muslim civil-rights group, a terrorist organization.
CAIR has since responded to Abbott's announcement. "Instead of wasting taxpayer resources on this latest anti-Muslim political stunt, Governor Abbott should focus on our state's real problems under his leadership, from harmful data centers to school shootings to economic inequality to the erosion of religious freedom," the group's Texas branch said in a statement, per FOX 4.
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