A former Justice Department attorney under President Reagan, Hasson is a charismatic speaker, a clever lawyer, and a compelling writer. He is also a conservative self-promoter who sometimes writes as though he alone is capable of understanding the First Amendment. That’s ironic, to say the least, because the Becket Fund often seems more like an operation of the Religious Right than a defender of religious liberty.

The avowed strategy of the Becket Fund is to ensure religious liberty by encouraging the maximum amount of religious activity. Indeed, the Becket Fund has represented Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Jews in court. (To his credit, Kevin Hasson unequivocally supported the right of Keith Ellison to carry a Koran while being sworn in as a Congressman.) But the Becket Fund is far more likely to defend Christians facing legal difficulty than non-Christians, and is particularly willing to defend Christian clergy accused of hate speech, including hate speech against Muslims. Unless accompanied by a disavowal of the hateful content, such a defense of free speech has little to do with religious liberty, which must always be concerned with maintaining a baseline public civility without which religious pluralism won’t work.

Furthermore, the Becket Fund proposes to use government to empower religion, but mainly religion of the "right" kind. It supports school prayer, which would almost surely be controlled by evangelical Christians, and school vouchers. In other words, the Becket Fund wants legal opinion to take a direction that more closely approximates the preferences of center-right Christians than non-Christians. It’s okay to advocate that, but it’s not the same thing as religious liberty. It’s a selective defense of—and therefore an advocacy for—the social interests of conservative Christianity.

Hasson also excludes secularists from his societal equation, which sets religion and secular society on a legal collision course. But religious liberty doesn’t only mean freedom for religion, but—under certain circumstances—freedom from religion, as when your children are being taught a theology you don’t like. Furthermore, secularists are a counterweight to the nationalist ambitions and bizarre theologies of the Religious Right. Legally empowering religious believers and encouraging them to fight secularists—and ultimately each other—is a recipe for intensifying the culture wars, not ending them.

The Becket Fund often seems more concerned about protecting religious practice than defending actual people discriminated against because of a perceived religious affiliation. Nor does it demonstrate much awareness of the way religious bigotry happens in societies. Anti-Semitism was first used by pan-German nationalists in the late 19th century, and from there passed into popular political discourse. This led to the moral collapse of Germany, the Holocaust, and the destruction of Europe.

We are now in a period in which Islamophobia could similarly enter American political discourse—but don’t hold your breath waiting for the Becket Fund to do anything about it. Their ritual bashing of an organization that’s already under attack has more to do with political posturing for their conservative base than religious liberty. But innocent people guilty of nothing more than FWM—Flying While Muslim—cannot wait for civil aviation to clean its own house. They need justice now.