After his bill (possibly inadvertently) legalizing the killing of abortion providers gets shut down, Tim Murphy writes that South Dakota Rep. Phil Jensen has also given up on a statewide ban on Sharia law:
In other words, the Sharia ban would replace a non-existent problem (in testimony this week, proponents of a Sharia ban could not produce a single South Dakota case in which Islamic law had been a problem) with a bunch of very real ones. And to that, add a long list of other potential problems: Thomas Barnett, executive director of the South Dakota State Bar, told legislators that a similar bill would in effect prohibit courts from citing Common Law; a representative of Citibank, which is headquartered in Sioux Falls, testified that the same bill would hurt its ability to honor contracts overseas (and by extension, South Dakota); and the ACLU argued that, as in Oklahoma, a proposed ban would impede the administration of tribal courts.
But on Thursday, after first speaking for 10 minutes on various crimes committed by Muslims abroad and in the United States (none of which occured in South Dakota), Jensen announced a major discovery: It is apparently already illegal in South Dakota to behead your wife. "It was discovered by our judiciary [committee] that we already have in our code protections that should cover the concerns addressed," he explained. Well, yeah. The committee then voted unanimously to kill the proposal.
It's already legal to kill someone in self defense, too. Maybe Jensen should propose some laws that aren't on the books yet. Like the abortion bill, the "Sharia ban" was so ambiguous as to leave room for a lot of mischief:
No such court may apply international law, the law of any foreign nation, or any foreign religious or moral code with the force of law in the adjudication of any case under its jurisdiction.
I can think of any number of ways to turn this on its head, even if it didn't already violate freedom of religion. You could argue that since some Americans are Muslim, Sharia isn't "foreign"; you could argue that Christianity was founded in the Middle East so it is. It was just a dumb bill, written for a dumb reason. Both bills are just an example of someone trying to stuff their religious beliefs and personal prejudices into the state legal code.
