March 22, 2006
Sharia vs. the US Constitution
Here is a fascinating article about the interaction between Islamic sharia and the US Constitution.
What possible interaction could there be? When Islamists attempt to create religious enclaves in the US where they may freely enforce sharia.
Something similar happened in Canada recently, when imams wanted to use sharia to settle family disputes. This, obviously, always wound up favoring the men in the situation, as most of the extreme forms of Islam are ragingly misogynist and it was mostly extremists who wanted to enforce sharia anyways. Canada wound up having to disallow religious groups from settling these things out of court at all, including historically successful Jewish and Catholic groups that had functioned admirably for years.
One possible solution would be to specifically exclude Islam from acceptable forms of religious expression, but that would indeed seem to violate the 1st amendment. There doesn't seem to be a legal way of defining Islam as falling outside the realm of civilization, and as Islamists always seek to use liberal tolerance to create bastions of intolerance, this is indeed a thorny problem.
The Ontarian government should have passed legislation analagous to Title VII discrimination law which would have governed all such religiously-based arbitration systems. Any demonstration of disparate treatment or impact based on sex, age, or race would have resulted in an injunction barring the system's continued functioning until the court was assured that the structural bias had been fixed. Given the judiciary's likely prejudice against sharia law, this would be an effective means of preserving traditional American religious freedoms while enforcing Constitutional norms without appearing to specifically target a given religious group.
Our guide in this area should be measures such as Holland's ban on covering one's face in public: crafty measures which are substantively non-discriminatory because they apply to all citizens, but whose sole effect is to constrain Islamic extremism.
Thoughts?
Posted by: Julian at March 22, 2006 11:34 PM