BELATEDLY and from one state over I happily note the demise of three Muslim-baiting politicians in Tennessee in Thursday's primary elections. Ron Ramsey suggested that Muslims may not be entitled to first-amendment protections: he finished third in one of the weirdest primaries of the season, behind Bill Haslam and Zach Wamp (but comfortably ahead of everyone's favourite gold-fringe-hating sideshow). Vijay Kumar paid for a billboard on I-24 just outside Nashville urging Tennesseans to "Defeat Universal Jihad Now" by voting for him: he finished fourth. And Lou Ann Zelenik, running in Murfreesboro, voiced suspicions about a new mosque being built by the rapidly growing Muslim community in that city: she too appears to have lost, though she has not yet conceded.

As it happens, I visited the current mosque in Murfreesboro two Fridays ago. It is a small building tucked behind a surveying company and an off-brand Jiffy Lube. Congregants prayed in the parking lot, and one told me that they had to turn away children from weekend classes for lack of space. I was also told that Ms Zelenik had never responded to several invitations to sit down with congregants to discuss her suspicions (as indeed she failed to return five of my telephone calls), leading one woman to suspect that they were simply a vote-getting ploy, and that the issue would fade after the primary. So one hopes—and it bears mentioning that every person I spoke to at the Murfreesboro mosque and at another in Nashville said that they enjoyed good relations with their neighbours, they were happy to be raising families in Tennessee, and that flesh-and-blood supporters and friends outnumbered and outweighed the windy and opportunistic rantings of bigots on the airwaves.

It does seem odd, though, that some of the most strident anti-Muslim political rhetoric of the season has come not from Michigan, California, New York or New Jersey (all states with large Muslim communities), but from Tennessee. Nashville may have a fair number of Muslims, and Murfreesboro's population may be outgrowing its mosque, but neither city is Dearborn or Paterson. Yet demagogues ye will always have with you; more troubling than the poison spread by these opportunists was the silence of their rivals. It matters strategically, as my colleague wrote this week, and it matters because the constitution matters. And I can't quite decide whether Mr Ramsey's minimalist interpretation of the first amendment (and Lindsay Graham's desire to chip away at the fourteenth) is tragedy or farce.