Newsom Bombshell on “Honoring Muslims” — What Must Americans Do?

California lawmakers have completed legislative action on a bill that would formally recognize Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha in state law, sending one of the year’s most closely watched religious-accommodation measures toward Gov. Gavin Newsom after a series of late-session amendments narrowed some of its most controversial language.

Assembly Bill 2017, authored by Democratic Assemblymember Matt Haney of San Francisco, is no longer awaiting action in the state Senate. The Senate passed the measure on August 30 by a 29-4 vote, and the Assembly later concurred in the Senate amendments 69-0. The final legislative action came after the Assembly had originally approved an earlier version 64-1 on May 26.

The bill now moves through the enrollment process toward Newsom’s desk. If signed, it would add the two principal Islamic holidays to California’s statutory list of state holidays while stopping short of requiring a universal shutdown of courts, state offices, schools or private businesses.

That distinction is central to understanding what AB 2017 would actually do. The measure recognizes Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha on the state’s civil calendar, but it expressly excludes both dates from the list of judicial holidays. Courts therefore would not automatically close simply because the holidays are added to state law.

The legislation also does not give every state employee two new paid days off. Instead, qualifying state employees would be allowed to elect an eight-hour holiday credit for Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha in place of an existing personal holiday credit. The structure is intended to make religious observance easier without creating an automatic additional paid holiday for the entire state workforce.

Public schools and community colleges would likewise not be ordered to close statewide. Local governing boards could close campuses for either Eid holiday through the collective-bargaining and memorandum-of-understanding procedures specified in existing California law. School employees could receive a paid holiday only where the applicable local agreement provides for it.

The final bill therefore gives local districts flexibility rather than imposing a single calendar on every community. In its findings, the Legislature states that inclusion on the state holiday calendar does not by itself require closure of courts, state offices, schools, community colleges, local agencies or private businesses.

Haney has framed the proposal as a matter of equal treatment for Muslim Californians who currently have to arrange school or workplace schedules around holidays that move each year because they follow the Islamic lunar calendar.

“California is home to one of the largest and most vibrant Muslim communities in the country, and their traditions deserve recognition and respect,” Haney said when announcing the bill in March. He argued that students should not have to choose between an important religious observance and school, and that workers should not feel forced to sacrifice observance because of workplace scheduling.

Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, the month in which observant Muslims fast from dawn to sunset. Eid al-Adha, often translated as the Festival of Sacrifice, is associated with the Islamic account of Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son in obedience to God and coincides with the period of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Supporters, including the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Impact Council and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs, have argued that formal recognition would reduce recurring scheduling conflicts for Muslim families and signal that the state’s public calendar reflects the diversity of its population.

CAIR-California welcomed the bill’s final legislative passage on August 31 and urged Newsom to sign it. The organization emphasized that the measure permits K-12 schools and community colleges to close only through locally negotiated agreements and allows employees to use existing leave or holiday-credit mechanisms rather than automatically adding two paid statewide shutdown days.

The bill has also drawn opposition, particularly from the California Family Council, a conservative Christian advocacy organization. The group has said it supports the ability of students to take time away from school for religious observance but objects to giving named religious holidays special treatment in state education law and to authorizing state-developed classroom materials connected to the holidays.

That criticism, however, has to be read alongside an important late change in the legislation. Earlier versions of AB 2017 allowed public schools to conduct exercises “acknowledging and celebrating the meaning and importance” of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The California Family Council repeatedly cited that wording as evidence that the proposal went beyond neutral accommodation and into government-sponsored celebration of religion.

The final Senate-amended version no longer uses that phrase for Eid. It now says public schools and educational institutions may conduct exercises, using existing resources, “exploring the history of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.” The State Board of Education may develop a model curriculum guide for those optional exercises.

That change matters because it narrows one of the sharpest disputes surrounding the bill. The latest text also contains findings stating that public educational institutions may provide objective academic instruction about the history, cultural traditions and civic significance of the holidays, and that no student or employee is required to participate in an instructional exercise, ceremony or cultural activity.

The bill further says it is intended to be interpreted consistently with both the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution. Those provisions appear designed to reinforce the distinction between teaching about a religion, which public schools routinely may do in an objective academic context, and requiring religious participation or devotional observance, which raises different constitutional concerns.

The California Family Council continues to oppose AB 2017, and its broader argument has not disappeared. The group maintains that California should use a religion-neutral accommodation system rather than selecting particular faith traditions for named statutory recognition. It has also argued that Christian and Jewish holidays do not receive identical treatment in the specific provisions it has criticized.

Supporters respond that California’s calendar already contains a growing number of cultural and religiously rooted observances and that formal recognition does not amount to religious endorsement. They point to recent state recognition of Lunar New Year and Diwali and argue that Eid should receive comparable civil treatment for scheduling, leave and educational planning purposes.

The debate is therefore about more than whether Muslim students should be allowed to miss school for Eid. California law already provides broad avenues for religious accommodation, and the final version of AB 2017 explicitly says the measure supplements rather than diminishes existing protections. The larger question is whether the state should identify Eid by name in its civil holiday code and build optional administrative and educational rules around it.

The final amendments also make the bill more limited than some descriptions circulating online. An earlier version included language concerning a specific statutory excused-absence provision for pupils. That section is not part of the final August 27 text. Instead, the Legislature’s findings refer to existing protections for excused absences and describe the new law as a way to improve predictable planning around the dates on which observances occur.

The bill’s state-employee provisions are also frequently overstated. Recognition as a state holiday under AB 2017 would not mean every government office closes and every employee receives an additional paid holiday. The operative leave provision allows an eligible employee to elect Eid as the date connected to an eight-hour holiday credit in lieu of a personal holiday credit already available under state law.

At schools, the same principle of local control remains. A district cannot simply treat Eid as a mandatory statewide closure. A local governing board must follow the memorandum-of-understanding and collective-bargaining process specified by the legislation. The final findings say that this process allows districts to consider attendance patterns, staffing needs, instructional continuity, fiscal effects and community circumstances.

The legislation would also allow similar local treatment at community colleges. As with K-12 schools, the structure is designed to permit accommodation where local demand makes it practical rather than force every institution in California to adopt the same calendar.

California would not be the first state to recognize both Eid holidays in law. Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed legislation in April 2025 recognizing Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and his office described Washington as the first state to do so.

But the Washington comparison requires an important qualification. Washington’s enacted Eid law classified the two dates as legislatively recognized nonlegal holidays; it did not create two new paid state holidays. Washington separately has a longstanding law allowing many public employees to take up to two unpaid holidays per year for reasons of faith or conscience. That unpaid-leave right is broader than Eid and was not created by the 2025 Eid-recognition law itself.

California’s proposal is therefore different in structure. It would place Eid on the state’s statutory holiday list, allow eligible state employees to substitute an existing holiday credit, permit negotiated school and community-college closures, and authorize optional classroom instruction exploring the history of the two holidays.

The measure passed with substantial bipartisan support at several stages. The Assembly’s May vote was 64-1, the Senate approved the final version 29-4, and the Assembly’s concurrence in Senate amendments was recorded 69-0. Those margins show that the bill’s core concept attracted support beyond the Democratic lawmakers who sponsored it, even as conservative advocacy groups continued to raise objections.

The late amendments also demonstrate how the legislative process changed the substance of the debate. Critics who objected to schools being authorized to “celebrate” Eid were responding to language that genuinely appeared in earlier versions. But anyone describing the bill now should also acknowledge that the phrase was removed and replaced with language focused on exploring history.

Similarly, supporters who describe the measure as giving Muslim public employees two new paid holidays risk overstating it. The final text uses an existing-credit mechanism and repeatedly states that recognition on the civil calendar does not automatically shut down public institutions.

What can be said with confidence is that California lawmakers have approved a significant expansion of formal state recognition for Eid. The bill would place Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha alongside other named observances in California law and create specific options for state employees and public educational institutions to accommodate them.

What it would not do is establish mandatory Islamic religious observance, order every public school to close, create two automatic additional paid days off for all state workers or make the holidays judicial closure days.

The political argument will now shift from the Legislature to the governor. Supporters are urging Newsom to sign the measure as a practical step toward religious inclusion and predictable accommodation. Opponents are asking him to reject what they view as selective state recognition of particular religious traditions, even after the bill’s most controversial school-language provision was softened.

The decision facing Newsom is therefore narrower than many of the viral descriptions suggest. AB 2017 is not a statewide mandate to celebrate Islam. It is a civil-calendar and accommodation bill that formally recognizes two Islamic holidays, gives public institutions limited options to account for them and leaves most actual closures and workplace arrangements to existing leave rules and local decisionmaking.

If Newsom signs it, California will become one of the states giving Eid formal statutory recognition, but with a framework distinct from Washington’s. If he vetoes it, the debate over how California should balance religious neutrality, equal accommodation and named recognition of faith-linked holidays is unlikely to disappear.