American Thinker wrote an article back in 2005 titled, “Top Ten Reasons Why Sharia Is Bad for All Societies.“ It noted that drinkers and gamblers should be whipped, that husbands could beat their wives “even if the husbands merely fear highhandedness in their wives,” that homosexuals be executed and commands that unmarried fornicators be stoned to death.
It also says that if a woman is raped, but cannot produce four witnesses, she is punished for the fornication. For example, the Saudi Gazette carried a story about a 23 year old woman who accepted a ride from a strange man, who then took her back to his house and gang raped her with four of her friends. She was charged with adultery and sentenced to one year in prison and 100 lashes.
Another high profile case recently was where a 75 year old woman was sentenced to 40 lashes and four months in prison for mingling, which means they were sitting together in her house.
While this is outrageous to most Americans, there is at least one who thinks this could be applied to cases in the United States. The dangerous part is he’s an Obama nominee…for the State Department’s legal advisor:
JUDGES should interpret the Constitution according to other nations’ legal “norms.” Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an “axis of disobedience” along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq.
Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government’s top lawyers: Harold Koh.
President Obama has nominated Koh — until last week the dean of Yale Law School — to be the State Department’s legal adviser. In that job, Koh would forge a wide range of international agreements on issues from trade to arms control, and help represent our country in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.
It’s a job where you want a strong defender of America’s sovereignty. But that’s not Koh. He’s a fan of “transnational legal process,” arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.
What would this look like in a practical sense? Well, California voters have overruled their courts, which had imposed same-sex marriage on the state. Koh would like to see such matters go up the chain through federal courts — which, in turn, should look to the rest of the world. If Canada, the European Human Rights Commission and the United Nations all say gay marriage should be legal — well, then, it should be legal in California too, regardless of what the state’s voters and elected representatives might say.
He even believes judges should use this “logic” to strike down the death penalty, which is clearly permitted in the US Constitution.
The primacy of international legal “norms” applies even to treaties we reject. For example, Koh believes that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — a problematic document that we haven’t ratified — should dictate the age at which individual US states can execute criminals. Got that? On issues ranging from affirmative action to the interrogation of terrorists, what the rest of the world says, goes.
Including, apparently, the world of radical imams. A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that “in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.”
This guy has no respect for American sovereignty or American laws. He said “I’d rather have [former Supreme Court Justice Harry] Blackmun, who uses the wrong reasoning in Roe [v. Wade] to get the right results, and let other people figure out the right reasoning.”
Never mind what the Constitution or the law says. It reminds me of something Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” This is exactly what America doesn’t need.
(Hat Tip: Jihad Watch)
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