In the 19th century, Catholicism was regarded by many people in this country as thoroughly incompatible with Americanism. They saw it as a hostile foreign element that would subvert democracy. Today, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, and they are taken to be as American as Mountain Dew.
We’ve come a long way in religious tolerance. Or maybe not. The belief that Catholics are irredeemably alien and disloyal has given way to the fear that Muslims pose a mortal threat to our way of life.
That distrust is behind a push in state legislatures to forbid courts from applying Islamic Shariah law in any case. Arizona, Tennessee, Louisiana and Oklahoma have passed these bans, though the Oklahoma law was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.
The chief sponsor, Republican Rep. Peggy Mast, explained, “I want to make sure people understand there’s sometimes a conflict between other laws and the Constitution, and we need to assert our Constitution is still the law of the land.” That’s like asserting that the sun is hot: It will be true regardless.
The change will have about as much effect in Kansas as a ban on indoor co-ed field hockey. It turns out no one has been able to find a case where a Kansas court has actually employed Islamic strictures to reach a verdict.
If, for instance, a Muslim man marries a Muslim woman and then tries to divorce her by saying “I divorce you” three times, in accordance with Shariah, he will find he’s wasted his breath. State marriage law will govern in Kansas just as it has in other states when it conflicts with the dictates of Islam.
