Courtroom interior_newWritten by Don Byrd

Citing a lack of standing, a federal judge in Florida dismissed a suit claiming a gun store’s declaration of being a “Muslim-free zone” violates Title 2 of the Civil Rights Act. The Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a claim on behalf of its membership arguing the store policy “does not allow Muslims to benefit from the entertainment it provides the general Non-Muslim public,” and “has singled out Muslims as a group of people that it intends to treat differently.” 

The judge’s ruling in favor of the defendant is, importantly, not a decision that declares such discrimination would be lawful. Instead, the judge agreed with the defendant that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated the level of injury necessary to bring a lawsuit. In short, the plaintiffs have not yet been discriminated against, and have not shown that such discrimination is imminent.

Here is an excerpt from the ruling:

The only allegation of any future harm is that “Muslims will be held to a different standard than non-Muslims.” The Eleventh Circuit has repeatedly held that this kind of naked claim fails to satisfy the standing requirement.

The Supreme Court held [in Lujan] that “such ‘some day’ intentions – without any description of concrete plans, or indeed even any specification of when the some day will be – do not support a finding of the ‘actual or imminent’ injury that our cases require.”

[T]he general desire of Plaintiff in this case to have Muslims able to access Defendant’s shooting range someday in the future is insufficient as well. There are simply no facts grounding the assertion that Plaintiff and/or one of its constituents will be harmed – Plaintiff has failed to allege “when and in what manner the alleged injuries are going to occur.”

A business policy that attempts to restrict access to members of certain faiths runs counter to religious freedom principles enshrined in the law, including the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits a place of public accommodation from denying full and equal enjoyment of goods, services, and facilities. The judge in this case delivered just that warning to the defendant gun shop in a footnote:

Defendant is cautioned that Title II of the Civil Rights Act was designed to redress the very type of circumstances presented by the instant allegations, to the extent that they are accurate. The legislative history reveals that the primary purpose of the Act was to remove “the humiliation, frustration, and embarrassment that a person must surely feel when he is told that he is unacceptable as a member of the public because of” a protected characteristic, like race or religion.

The dismissal of CAIR’s suit does not suggest that federal law allows the exclusion of Muslims, or discrimination against Muslim customers by businesses accessible to the public. It suggests that our courts rightly demand that a dispute meets all rules of civil procedure before it can be adjudicated on its merits. We may not have heard the end of this story.