Challenging Sharia Law Means Challenging Islam As A Religion
10/13/2012
There are more efforts underway to stop Sharia Law from becoming in the this country. So far, efforts have failed:
Federal court blocks Oklahoma ban on Sharia – January 10, 2012
(CNN) — “A federal appeals court has blocked an Oklahoma voter-approved measure barring state judges from considering Islamic and international law in their decisions. The three-judge panel at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier injunction preventing State Question 755 from being certified until the free speech questions are resolved. The decision Tuesday allows a lawsuit brought by Islamic-American groups to move ahead to a bench trial.
“The proposed amendment discriminates among religions,” said the judges. “The Oklahoma amendment specifically names the target of its discrimination. The only religious law mentioned in the amendment is Sharia law….”In bringing suit, CAIR argued that the amendment violates the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. The group’s local leader, Muneer Awad, has said the amendment passed in November 2010 under a campaign of fear and misinformation about Islam.”
Harold
ACGR's "News with Attitude" 
Kidd mistakenly believes that American courts are now permitted to base decisions on Islamic “Sharia Law.” They are not. It is a long-standing principle of constitutional law, rigorously enforced by the appeals courts, that judges cannot make religious decisions. They cannot base decisions on religious “laws.” Over the years judges have in some instances mistakenly gotten entangled in biblical law or Jewish law or Islamic law, but the appeals courts reject any decisions based on religious “laws,”
Kidd mistakenly believes that the “Shariah bans” contemplated by some states would change the law. But the problem with the measures proposed in those states is not that they would newly ban consideration of Shariah law. It is already unconstitutional to base decisions on Shariah law or any other religious “law.” The problem with those measures, re “Shariah law,” is that they stupidly forbid what is already forbidden and insult an entire religion in the process. The problem re the states’ attempts to ban any consideration of “foreign law” is that they are intruding on the judiciary in ways they don’t even contemplate, such as the question of how to evaluate thousands of cases where people have been married or divorced in other countries, and American courts need to determine marital status. It is the task of judges to trace the foreign law in these cases, precisely to be able to determine marital status without becoming entangled in the status of the marriage under “religious law.”
Kidd says, “Just because Islam has been called a religion for a few thousand years, doesn’t make it so.” She has a confused understanding of the history. Islam did not emerge as a religion until the 7th Century, about 1400 years ago – not “a few thousand years.” But 1400 years of being recognized as a religion is still pretty significant, and about 2 billion people on earth say Islam is their religion. Kidd is outrageously pretentious and unwise to suggest that our government get involved in deciding whose religion is truly a religion and whose religion is not. This would be exactly the kind of establishment of religion Kidd claims to oppose.