As the Supreme Court considers two cases on gay marriage this week, arguments on both sides of the issue are heating up. Perhaps it’s worth reconsidering whether the state should be involved in the institution of marriage to begin with, says Hussein Rashid, an associate editor at Religion Dispatches. “The state should not be involved in matters of religious duties and obligations,” he says.

In February, U.K. based Muslim MP Sadiq Khan received death threats for voting in favour of same-sex marriage. Ignoring Muslim voices that condemned these threats, many commenters generalized and stereotyped the entire Muslim community.

By the end of last February, after Patheos first covered the breakdown of trust between the NYPD and the area Muslim community, the trust deficit grew even deeper when a series of ongoing articles from the Associated Press exposed wide-reaching domestic surveillance programs set up for the NYPD by the CIA. The last straw came with the report that the NYPD had been conducting secret surveillance on Muslim Student Associations at 16 colleges across New York and northeastern United States.  Click here to see how several NY-area academics, activists and students reacted to the news.

Islamophobia is alive in America, and Hussein Rashid sees it playing out among Sikhs, often mistaken for Muslims. In the most recent example, a member of her own party mistook a Californian GOP candidate, who is Sikh, for being a Muslim. “The reality is that Islamophobia has very real consequences and more and more victims of Islamophobia and Islamophobic rhetoric tend to be non-Muslims,” Rashid said.