Excerpt:
The Islamic Center, housed in a magnificent building in Washington, D.C., has been around for over a half-century, but it is seldom in the news. Unless you drive by (on Embassy Row) you would not know that it there. Because it is supposed to be a peaceful place of worship, we would not expect local police to enter.
Yet last March they did. Three D.C. Metropolitan police officers entered the center, at the direction of an imam, and removed six Muslim women. Their crime? They were worshiping peacefully in the main prayer hall after the imam announced that women were forbidden to enter that area.
What happened in Washington, D.C., should remind us of the peaceful sit-ins of the 1960s. The courts found that the police action removing people from private businesses violated the Equal Protection Clause.