Colorado’s newest mosque is not the threat. The red-green alliance is

By Wayne Laugesen | Commentary, Wayne’s Word

The Islamic Society of Colorado Springs wants to build southern Colorado’s first dedicated mosque, a 14,680-square-foot worship and education center on five acres off of Woodmen Road, just outside the city limits.

The congregation has more than 1,000 members and has congregated in a converted laundromat on North Chestnut Street since 1996. Now, they want a proper home.¹

Not everyone is celebrating. In February, about 20 protesters lined Woodmen Road with signs. Their organizer said her beef isn’t with the building. It’s with Sharia law.²

So, first things first. 

In Colorado, Muslims are our neighbors, co-workers, doctors, soldiers, and friends. Jesus told us to love our neighbors and he didn’t attach an asterisk. The First Amendment gives this congregation the same right to build that any Baptist, Catholic, or Jewish congregation enjoys. It does not protect breaking the law in the name of religion.

The protesters are right to raise concerns about the spread of Islamic values and the imposition of Islamic Sharia law. Sharia as private devotion is one thing. Sharia as a political system is another. With a new mosque set for our backyard this offers an opportunity to talk honestly about the difference.

Decades ago, I swallowed the slogan that Islam is simply a religion of peace. Then I read Quran 9:5, the so-called sword verse: “When the inviolable months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them.”³

Hundreds of millions of Muslims never treat it as a marching order. Jihadists do. The problem isn’t Muslims. It’s Sharia-centric Islamism, a nihilistic extreme-right political agenda cloaked in religious robes.

Check out Europe for what happens when governments ignore the difference and fail to fully integrate Muslim populations. In Sweden, police list 65 “vulnerable areas” where crime and parallel power structures challenge the state. In France, a 2025 government report warns of growing Islamist “ecosystems.”

Meanwhile, in Rotherham, England, gangs made up mostly of British-Pakistani men groomed and raped some 1,400 girls while officials looked away; shockingly, the craven cowards were afraid of getting labeled as racist. Then came the Cologne New Year’s Eve assaults and Belgium’s Molenbeek, the launch pad for the Paris attacks of 2015. Rapid migration without assimilation invites trouble.⁴

Now, consider what’s going on domestically.

In Dearborn, Michigan, where Muslims comprise a majority, a federal lawsuit filed last month claims the city spent tax revenues on Ramadan displays while ignoring requests to recognize Easter and Passover. After a Christian pastor raised concerns, Mayor Abdullah Hammoud called him a “bigot” and said he wasn’t welcome in the city. Hammoud snubs complaints about the town’s five daily amplified calls to prayer.⁵

Meanwhile, in North Texas, the East Plano Islamic Center is building EPIC City — 402 acres with more than 1,000 homes around a mosque and school. Critics fear a religious enclave that enforces Islamic law. Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law aimed at “discriminatory compounds.” Lawsuits and federal housing investigations dog the project, which is now called The Meadow.⁶

Can these Muslim communities accommodate the American way of life? Charlie Kirk argued that Islamic teachings on apostasy, blasphemy, and the status of non-Muslims clash with free speech and equal protection.⁷

Demography raises the stakes. According to Pew Research Center, Muslims have the highest fertility of any major religious group, and it projects Europe’s Muslim population could nearly triple by 2050 if migration trends continue. 

Numbers threaten no one. Assimilation determines outcomes.⁸

This brings us to the oddest bedfellow trend in politics: the red-green alliance. Hard leftists (red) and Islamists (green) disagree on nearly everything but team up against Israel, capitalism, Americans, and western institutions. I see it at Colorado protests run by openly socialist and communist groups in which crowds chant “globalize the intifada.” They pitch it as anti-colonial poetry. 

The red-green alliance isn’t merely noise from the radical fringe. It wins elections. Zohran Mamdani, an Islamic “democratic socialist,” runs New York City. In June, Denver Democrats dumped 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette for 29-year-old socialist Melat Kiros, who was born in Ethiopia and brought up in Aurora. The candidate lost a law-firm job in 2023 after writing that calls to wipe Israel off the map aren’t antisemitic. She refuses to concede that the attack on Boulder Jews, by a Colorado Springs Islamic fundamentalist, were antisemitic.

The irony could choke a horse. The left treats abortion, an abomination, as a sacred right. Islamic law severely restricts it. The left preaches women’s equality; traditional Sharia gives a daughter half a son’s inheritance. The left waves rainbow flags; Islamic theocracies execute gays. Progressives chanting “from the river to the sea” either ignore these contradictions or dislike America enough to cheer anyone who hates it, no matter what they stand for.⁹

The answer is not the prohibition of mosques. We have better tools: the Establishment Clause, equal protection, and ordinary criminal and civil law. Courts don’t let canonical law override civil law for Catholics, and the same must go for Sharia. Faith is protected. Violence and schemes to impose religious law are not, whatever God the schemers invoke. The real risk isn’t theocracy tomorrow. It’s a slow drip of special favors for one faith, and officials who call every objector a bigot.

County Commissioners cannot stop Muslims from building a mosque without violating Amendment One. As such, we must keep a sharp eye on the ideologues, red and green, who would turn our country’s beautiful protection of religion into cover for an agenda that despises the freedom protecting it.

As the First Amendment precludes mosque prohibition, it also forbids the imposition of religious laws that conflict with agnostic laws of the land. As the country’s Islamic demographic growth outpaces all other demographics, we must enforce the First Amendment as if our country’s survival rests on it.

God bless America, our diverse religious culture, and the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT WAYNE’S WORD

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