CAIR Sponsored Bill to add Muslim Holidays to California’s Official State Holidays Headed to Gov’s Desk?

A mere 25 years since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States by nineteen Islamic extremists, and the California Legislature appears ready to adopt two Muslim holidays.

Are Democrats following in the footsteps or one-upping a Minnesota school district, which recently approved a Muslim holiday to its academic calendar?

Public schools are public institutions meant for foundational academic learning, literacy, numeracy, reading comprehension and mathematical problem-solving, history, geography, science, and the arts, and the ability to use them fluently, not centers for religious or ideological indoctrination.

AB 2017, sponsored by CAIR, authored by Assemblyman Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) would add the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha to California’s list of official state holidays, authorizing schools to close along with 11 other state recognized holidays.

The bill was put on the suspense file August 3, and appeared it would not make the cut. But Friday, the Senate read the legislation for a second time and ordered it to a third reading, meaning it could be on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk Monday morning.

Bill sponsors, the Council on American-Islamic Relations California (CAIR-CA), the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs (CAPIAA), and the recently formed Muslim Impact Council, claim the measure is a matter of “equity” so Muslim students and workers do not have to choose between religious observance and school or work, Haney said.

The Globe reported on Haney’s bill in July, noting preferential formal recognition plus curriculum celebration for one minority faith, while majority Christian cultural markers are often generically renamed, is not strict neutrality. It is selective accommodation. Similar optional recognition already exists or is expanding for other non-Christian observances (Diwali, Lunar New Year etc.). Pure consistency would either secularize all religious holidays uniformly or treat major faiths even-handedly without privileging celebration of one.

However, Christians remain the largest religious group in California, with Pew reporting 55% of adults identifying as Christian, and Catholics form a large plurality within that. Muslims are a small minority – only 1%.

Additional optional or elective holidays for many state employees include Lunar New Year, Genocide Remembrance Day (April 24), Diwali, Juneteenth (June 19), and Native American Day (fourth Friday in September). These are not mandatory closures for all state offices, but state employees may take holiday credit in place of a personal holiday.

Assemblyman Haney insists California is home to one of the largest Muslim Communities, but neglects to acknowledge that Muslims are only 1% of the population.

Jews, Buddhists and Hindus are each 2% of the population. You will notice there are no official state Jewish holidays or Buddhist holidays.

In a statement, Assemblyman Haney said:

“California is home to one of the largest and most vibrant Muslim communities in the country, and their traditions deserve recognition and respect. No student should have to choose between celebrating one of the holiest days of their faith and showing up to school, and no worker should feel they have to sacrifice their religious observance. AB 2017 is about making sure Muslim Californians are seen, valued, and treated with the same dignity as every other community in our state.”

Jews and Buddhists anyone? What is stopping Muslims from taking a day of observance off? Nothing is.

“Advocates say the bill would send an important message of inclusion and belonging at a time when Muslim communities continue to face discrimination and rising Islamophobia across the country.”

Assemblyman Haney is naive at best, and perhaps complicit. I just received an email from “The CAIR Team – organizing for Palestine in Alabama. This week on CAIR On AIR, we’re joined by Hamza Abu-Hamdeh and Noor Al Dein, co-founders of Young Palestinians of Birmingham (YPB), a grassroots organization mobilizing communities in support of Palestinian self-determination.”

As the Globe reported Saturday, “Texas and Florida have each labeled CAIR a terrorist organization over the past year, citing its founders’ history and its status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation financing case. Congress has two bills pending that would direct a federal review. None of that has happened. The State Department hasn’t designated CAIR a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and a federal judge blocked Florida’s first designation attempt on First Amendment grounds before the state tried again this summer. It isn’t settled law, so skip the terrorist label for now.”

While California Democrats expand recognition of religious holidays for Muslims and Hindus, they have also secularized Christian holidays. They have renamed school breaks that coincide with Christmas and Easter, now commonly called “Winter Break” and “Spring Break.”

The left has also challenged Good Friday as an official religious school holiday; it was discontinued as a national holiday by the U.S. government after 1978.

And American school children have been fed a steady diet of anti-American, anti-Christian rhetoric in public schools and universities for the past 30+ years.

This bill amounts to the state authorizing and promoting the celebration of specific religious holidays inside public school classrooms. Teaching students to celebrate a religious holiday is not neutral. The state is directing public school teachers to lead exercises that acknowledge and celebrate the religious meaning of these observances, while having already removed all Christian teachings. That is the government taking sides on religion, and a violation of the First Amendment, which prohibits government from endorsing or specially favoring one religion over others.

If Democrats want to promote religious literacy, schools can teach about Catholicism, Protestantism, the Jewish faith, the Hindu faith, the Buddhist faith, and the Muslim faith.

This bill is not that.

Charlie Kirk warned that Islam is rising across the lands of the formerly Christian West. “Is Islam really just another faith among many? Is it equally compatible with Western civilization?” Charlie argued the answers are “No” and “No.” Islam is a unique threat to the West and will overrun it if not taken seriously. It’s a warning that all Christians raised in the fog of decades of pro-diversity propaganda.

Classical Islam is a comprehensive system that includes theology, law, politics, and social order. Many millions of Muslims live, work, and raise families in Western countries without incident.

However, Orthodox Sharia contains elements that clash with core Western legal and moral commitments: unequal inheritance and testimony for women, hudud corporal punishments, the death penalty for apostasy in classical jurisprudence, restrictions on blasphemy and criticism of Muhammad, and a historical dhimmi framework that assigned non-Muslims a legally inferior status. These are not fringe inventions; they are derived from the Quran, Hadith, and centuries of fiqh.

Will schools be teaching Orthodox Sharia and Jew hatred?

Charlie Kirk’s warning was that Islam as a “civilizational package” is a unique challenge and that ignoring it under “diversity” slogans is naïve, and there are  observable gaps between classical Islamic legal-political claims and liberal-democratic institutions.

We need clear-eyed policy on immigration, integration, and the defense of existing legal norms rather than incremental accommodation.

This bill, AB 2017, is one step closer to undermining American’s legal norms, and ushers in incremental accommodation.

The challenge becomes decisive and brings up questions on selection of immigrants, and the willingness of receiving societies to insist on the priority of their own constitutional order.

This bill is dangerous. And in the hands of the American left undermines Western Civilization.