While the Trump administration spends 2026 tearing down federal diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, the Massachusetts legislature is building a new one sized for exactly one religion. Senate Bill S.2134, “An Act promoting the civil rights and inclusion of American Muslims in the commonwealth,” would create a permanent 11-member commission whose duties include identifying and recommending Muslims for government appointments.
The bill has cleared its initial committees and now sits in the Senate Ways and Means Committee. I grew up in Boston, I still bleed Patriots red, and I have spent 30 years managing money as a fiduciary. Fiduciaries learn early that you do not build a system that quietly routes opportunity toward one class of people over another, however good the intentions behind it. Beacon Hill just proposed doing that with public office, and it picked religion as the sorting category.
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The bill’s members would be appointed by the governor, the attorney general, the state secretary, and the legislature’s leadership. Its mandate covers public education and research on discrimination against Muslim residents, and nobody should object to that piece. But the bill also directs the commission to identify and recommend qualified Muslims for appointive positions at every level of government. That is not a study commission examining a social problem. That is a standing government office with a permanent assignment to move members of one faith into public jobs.
Run that through the law, not the politics. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars employers, government included, from making employment and appointment decisions because of religion, and federal guidance is explicit that an employer cannot limit, segregate, or classify people in ways that affect their employment opportunities based on faith. A commission built to feed one religion’s adherents into appointive office does not need to hire anyone itself to create the problem. It only has to function as designed, which is a religiously screened talent pipeline feeding straight into decisions that federal law says must be religion blind.
The First Amendment adds a second layer. The establishment clause requires the government to stay neutral among faiths, not to build a standing office whose purpose is to elevate one religion’s access to public power. Massachusetts already runs commissions addressing sex, race, and sexual orientation, categories with a settled body of civil rights law behind them. Religion sits in a different constitutional lane. The Constitution does not ask the government to be neutral about outcomes for women or racial minorities in the appointment process; it asks the government to be neutral about religion, period. A permanent commission that exists to advance one faith’s presence in government is the arrangement the establishment clause was written to prevent, regardless of which faith gets the office.
Run the substitution test every honest legislator should run before voting on a bill like this. Rename it “An Act promoting the civil rights and inclusion of Southern Baptists in the commonwealth,” give it the same commission and the same mandate to recommend Baptists for appointive office, and watch how fast the sponsors who back S.2134 discover their inner establishment clause scholar. The test for whether a government program survives scrutiny is not whether you like the beneficiary. It is whether you would defend the identical structure with a different name stapled to it.
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Supporters will say the commission only recommends it does not hire, and that documented Islamophobia justifies the attention. Both points deserve a fair hearing. Discrimination against Muslim residents is real and worth studying, the same way discrimination against any Massachusetts resident is worth studying. But “recommends” carries a lot of weight in a bill that also names the commission the state’s channel for surfacing “qualified” candidates. Once a governor’s office has a standing state body handing it religiously screened names, the distance between recommending and deciding gets thin fast. Addressing discrimination against a group does not require building that group a dedicated pipeline into government jobs. It requires enforcing the antidiscrimination law that already covers them, the same law that would stop a Christian commission from trying the identical maneuver.
Beacon Hill has an easy fix on the table. Strip the appointment-recommendation function out of the bill, and it becomes an ordinary study commission, the kind Massachusetts already runs for other groups, and the kind that survives a courtroom. Leave that function in, and the state has built a religion-based sorting mechanism for public office, wrapped it in the language of civil rights, and dared someone to challenge it. Given the current makeup of the federal courts, someone will. The commonwealth that produced Brandeis, Warren, and Frankfurter ought to know better than to let a worthy cause draft a bill this careless with the First Amendment.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
