JANET LEVY: HAVE CONSERVATIVES BEEN BOUGHT OFF ON SHARIA?
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/have-conservatives-been-bought-off-on-shariah?f=puball
Look at the disturbing articles below. Two conservative publications – Townhall and National Review – are decrying any threat to America from Shariah!
In the Townhall piece, Steve Chapman chalks up opposition to shariah to religious intolerance. He states that no one has been able to find a case in which shariah was considered in a Kansas court. However, we know from a review of a small sample of published appellate court cases performed by the Center for Security Policy that there were 50 examples in 23 states that involved conflicts between shariah and constitutional law. Shariah had been applied or formally recognized in these cases.
Matthew Schmitz goes a step further into the absurd by claiming that the anti-shariah movement endangers our national security by alienating loyal Muslim citizens and “assaulting” their religious liberty. He refers to those who want to curtail the insinuation of shariah into American courts as “anti-Muslim bigots.”
An important note: Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS reportedly gave $4 million to Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform.
Other recent disturbing developments:
- The State Department removed sections covering the religious persecution of Christians since the “Arab Spring” from its Country Reports on Human Rights per the demands of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation).
- The FBI expunged 900 pages of training materials used in over 400 presentations deemed “offensive to Muslims” by a Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas-affiliated organization CAIR.
- The National Security Council (as well as State Department Muslim diplomatic appointees) met with OIC and MB leaders this year in Qatar for the World Islamic Forum (co-sponsored by the Saban Center of Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution).
- The Obama administration admitted to holding “hundreds” of closed-door meeting with jihad-supporting, Muslim Brotherhood subsidiary CAIR.
- Obama and Hillary Clinton support the restrictions on free speech passed by the OIC at the U.N. which makes it an international crime to criticize Islam. (The Istanbul Process)
The Bogus Threat from Shariah Law
In the 19th century, Catholicism was regarded by many people in this country as thoroughly incompatible with Americanism. They saw it as a hostile foreign element that would subvert democracy. Today, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, and they are taken to be as American as Mountain Dew.
We’ve come a long way in religious tolerance. Or maybe not. The belief that Catholics are irredeemably alien and disloyal has given way to the fear that Muslims pose a mortal threat to our way of life.
That distrust is behind a push in state legislatures to forbid courts from applying Islamic Shariah law in any case. Arizona, Tennessee, Louisiana and Oklahoma have passed these bans, though the Oklahoma law was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.
Fears of ‘Creeping Sharia’
On May 7, the Kansas House voted unanimously in favor of a bill barring judges and government agencies from basing decisions on sharia or other “foreign” legal systems. Four days later, the Senate voted 33 to 3 in favor of the measure, which was then carried through the capitol building, past John Steuart Curry’s famous painting of John Brown, to the office of Governor Sam Brownback, who signed it into law. This bill is only the latest manifestation of the growing anti-sharia movement in this country, which endangers our national security by alienating loyal Muslim citizens and assaults religious liberty by putting contracts with a religious motivation on an unequal footing with contracts that have no religious motivation.
Kansas’s new law forbids courts and agencies to respect contracts drawn up under “any law, legal code or system of a jurisdiction outside of any state or territory of the United States, including, but not limited to, international organizations and tribunals” if the legal system does not grant the same “fundamental liberties, rights and privileges granted under the United States and Kansas constitutions.”
Sharia, of course, does not grant all the rights that the U.S. Constitution does; neither does Christian canon law or Jewish Halakhic law (or English or French law, for that matter). But why should this fact prevent a court from honoring a contract made under the provisions of one of these “foreign” legal systems if the contract does not itself violate any U.S. or state regulations, laws, or constitutional provisions? Under one reading of the Kansas law, a contract that makes reference to canon law or sharia – but is otherwise perfectly legal – would be thrown out, while an identical one that makes no such reference would be upheld. The other possible reading of the law is that it only bars rulings based on foreign legal systems when the rulings themselves would violate constitutional rights. But in that case, as Professor Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia Law School has argued, the law is meaningless, for courts will not tolerate or enforce violations of constitutional rights in any case.
Janet Levy, MBA, MSW, is an activist, world traveler, and freelance journalist who has contributed to American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Full Disclosure Network, FrontPage Magazine, Family Security Matters and other publications. She blogs at www.womenagainstshariah.com
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