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No Chris Christie in Lansing: Rick Snyder Has No 'Formal Opinion' on Anti-Sharia Bill
A spokeswoman for Governor Rick Snyder says he is reviewing Rep. Dave Agema’s bill to prevent implementation of “foreign laws,” but hasn’t yet formed an opinion about it.
“The Governor hasn’t seen, our office hasn’t done an analysis of the bill,” said Snyder spokeswoman Geralyn Lasher. “Obviously, when the Governor was sworn into office, he swore to uphold the Constitution. He certainly believes in upholding state laws and believes local officials do the same. But again, we haven’t looked at the bill nor [do we] have a formal opinion on it.”
Which is a fancy way of saying Rick Snyder isn’t likely to repeat the courageous performance of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie anytime soon.
“This Sharia law business is crap,” said Christie. “It’s just crazy, and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
He’s right. The entire Sharia paranoia is based on the tiniest kernel of truth: Courts will sometimes, in private disputes such as divorces, consider the parties’ religious beliefs and customs when arbitrating a dispute. However when you extrapolate that kernel of truth into a full blown Islamist plot, you end up with a big lie.
Judges and juries cannot replace American civil law with Sharia law, or Rabbinical law or Canonical law. When a judge infamously attempted to do so in a New Jersey domestic violence case last year, he was immediately reversed on appeal.
That situation wasn’t the consequence of “creeping Sharia,” it was the result of an incompetent judge who probably should be removed from the bench, disbarred and denied any future employment that involves a task more complicated than saying “do you want fries with that?”
<blockquote> August 5, 2010, Fox News: First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA, said, “The Shariah law debate is a total distraction,” and he noted that in the U.S., two people may sign a contract and give an Islamic court the power to determine if the contract is breached. In a 2003 case, for instance, a Texas district court ruled that the private “Texas Islamic Court” should decide the amount a husband owed his wife in a divorce proceeding — because when they got married, they had signed a contract specifying that was what they wanted.
But assault is illegal, regardless of any contract, Volokh said, and the Appellate Court in New Jersey ruled correctly.
“The claimed religious practice of non-consensual sex involved in this case is so heinous that almost everybody thinks that you shouldn’t have the right to do that, no matter what your religious beliefs are.”
The husband in the case has been indicted on criminal charges and is expected to face trial in the fall.</blockquote>
So why are we even having this conversation?
Agema and his 39 co-sponsors can’t really, truly believe Muslim Americans living by Islamic law are an existential threat to our Constitutional liberties, right? If they did believe in such a threat, despite all evidence to the contrary, it would mean the greatest existential threat to our Constitutional liberties are the lackwits we send to Lansing.
In truth, these guys are the sort of rank populists that led H.L. Mencken to say “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Agema and company would probably say the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese, if they thought it would win them five more votes.
Indeed, it’s almost plausible to believe Sharia—a system described by no less a conservative than Edmund Burke as “a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned, and most enlightened jurisprudence that perhaps ever existed in the world”—might be preferable to a government of, for, and by imbecilic vulgarians like Dave Agema.
Of course, that’s idle hyperbole. The American system of governance and jurisprudence (along with its ironically foreign predecessor, British Common Law) is a treasure and a blessing. It doesn’t deserve to be sullied by a third-rate demagogue looking to make a name for himself by ginning up fear amongst the ignorant peasantry.
All the more reason why Governor Snyder should forcefully denounce this—to quote Governor Christie—“crap” without equivocation or further delay.
Jeff T. Wattrick
MLive.com