Imagine a state senator posts an internship ad. It offers a $1,000 stipend in her office, but the requirements are that applicants must identify as Christian or white and have a 3.5 GPA. Before lunch, the story would be national news, the senator would be defending herself on cable, and a civil rights lawyer would be drafting a complaint.
Now change the identities, ethnicities, and the religions.
Colorado State Senator Iman Jodeh, the first Muslim elected to the state legislature, and Representative Yara Zokaie — the first Iranian-American elected to the Colorado legislature, both Democrats — recently posted an internship advertisement for the MENASA & Muslim Joint Legislative Caucus; qualifications are explicit: applicants must identify as Muslim and/or Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian.
No other religious or ethnic identity need apply. The ad does not invite Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists, or anyone outside the approved categories. This is a government-adjacent internship funded and operated through the machinery of the Colorado legislature, yet it filters candidates by faith, ethnicity, race, and ancestry.
The reaction has been predictable among those still attached to the old, valuable, and honorable American idea that the state should not prefer one religion over another. The same criteria applied to any other group — an internship restricted to practicing Christians, or to Jews, or to white applicants — would trigger immediate legal action and institutional panic.
That double standard is the point.
American anti-discrimination law, rooted in the Equal Protection Clause and statutes that govern public employment and government programs, rejects official classifications based on religion or national origin when they exclude citizens from opportunity. Courts have long treated such barriers with skepticism precisely because the state is supposed to remain neutral among citizens.
One need not invent a fictional Supreme Court ruling to grasp the principle. A public internship that announces “Muslims preferred, others need not apply” collides with that principle. The selective silence surrounding this particular exclusion is revealing. The same voices that police every micro-aggression against protected classes suddenly discover the virtues of “affinity groups” and “lived experience” when the affinity is Islamic, and the experience is Middle Eastern. Equal protection, it turns out, is not a principle. It is a weapon.
But a deeper religious layer is worth examining, one rooted in Islam.
Muslims frequently emphasize solidarity and collective identity, placing the interests of the Muslim community above those of other religious groups. This sense of unity extends into the political arena, where shared religious identity can shape voting patterns and political mobilization. At the religious level, the outlook is often tied to the concept of the Ummah — the global Muslim community — and the belief that Muslims constitute the best community brought forth for humanity. From that perspective, strengthening bonds among Muslims, including those living in non-Muslim societies, is regarded as a religious virtue favored by Allah.
This theological dimension matters because it raises unavoidable questions about the relationship between Islamic religious obligations, communal allegiance, and the Western principle of equal treatment for all religious groups.
Can a religious framework that prioritizes the interests and solidarity of one faith community be fully reconciled with a secular democratic system founded on equal citizenship, religious neutrality, and the impartial treatment of every community?
The internship ad is not a mere innocent theological choice. It is a concrete administrative choice by elected officials holding public office. When those officials construct an official pipeline that privileges Muslim identity, they are not merely expressing personal piety. They are reflecting a communal Muslim preference into the operations of the state.
The language of diversity and inclusion collapses under this anecdote. This language is only deployed when it fits their religious preferences and political aspirations.
Diversity loses any coherent meaning when it is selectively applied to privilege certain religious or ethnic constituencies while locking others out. Inclusion becomes a synonym for exclusion once the approved identities are named and the disapproved ones are barred.
The same Muslim officials who would denounce a Christian-only internship as theocratic now defend a Muslim-only one as equity.
Americans should understand that Islam is not solely a private religious devotion. It is a religiopolitical ideology that extends religious principles into public institutions and political governance. In this paradigm, political participation can be used to advance a particular religious agenda, potentially exploiting the freedoms and democratic protections of Western societies in ways that test the very principles upon which those freedoms rest. Western democracies were not designed to host parallel systems of communal preference, let alone preferred legal particularities. They were designed to treat citizens as individuals equal under the law, regardless of the faith they bring into the public square.
The Colorado “Muslim-only” ad is small in dollar terms but large in principle. It normalizes the idea that government offices may sort applicants by religion and ancestry when the sorting favors the right groups. Once that door is opened, it does not close easily. The result will be a permanent contest of religious and ethnic favoritism dressed up as representation.
Muslim Senator Jodeh and Iranian-American Representative Zokaie have chosen the Ummah over equal citizenship. Their un-American choice should be named, criticized, and rejected.
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A. S. Ibrahim holds two PhDs in Islamic Studies. He is the author of “Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom” and “Islam and the West.” He has also authored “Muhammad’s Military Expeditions” (Oxford, 2024), “A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad” (Baker Academic, 2022), “Conversion to Islam” (Oxford, 2021), “Basics of Arabic” (Zondervan, 2021), “A Concise Guide to the Quran” (Baker Academic, 2020), and “The Stated Motivations for the Early Islamic Expansion” (Peter Lang, 2018), among others. Follow him on X: @al2ostaz
