On Friday, the Anniston Star reported that Alabama State Senator Gerald Allen was introducing a sharia law ban that plagiarizes Wikipedia:
The bill defines Shariah as “a form of religious law derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: The divine revelations set forth in the Qur’an and the example set by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.”
That definition is the same, almost word for word, as wording in the Wikipedia entry on Shariah law as it appeared Thursday. Allen said the wording was drafted by Legislative staff. A source on the staff at the Legislature confirmed that the definition was in fact pulled from Wikipedia.
Allen could not readily define Shariah in an interview Thursday. “I don’t have my file in front of me,” he said. “I wish I could answer you better.”
So Allen has no idea what sharia is. He’s just on brain stem autopilot, proposing a law that singles out a group of people based on their religion because he knows on some basic tribal level that he’s supposed to hate and fear them, he just doesn’t know why.
As Justin Elliott notes, “sharia is not a single set of written laws like the U.S. code; there are myriad interpretations of sharia.” The opinion of those panicking over the impending danger of a sharia takeover generally agree with Islamic extremists that sharia is the draconian one they prefer.
For example, we often hear that the punishment for adultery for women in Islam is death. But this is what Chapter 20 of Leviticus says:
And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
The argument of sharia opponents is that the Qu’ran directs Muslims to adhere to these kinds of draconian punishments and that they have no choice but to do so. But for some reason, despite the fact that Christian holy books also bestow the death penalty for reasons most of us would find ridiculous today, no one is trying to ban the practice of Christianity based on the idea that Christians are obligated by their own beliefs to replace secular American law with their own religious beliefs. Instead it’s obvious to all of us that despite what gets written in holy books, religious traditions are not immutable and unchanging.
Allen justified his ban by saying we’ll have to worry about the establishment of sharia a few decades down the road. But in the event that there are ever enough Muslims in the U.S. to make that a possibility, the ban would be useless anyway. The framers wrote the Constitution more than two hundred years ago and the establishment clause hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to legislate their religious views. Today we just call that “what the GOP does when they gain a majority.”
