Politics: SHARIA LAW IN AMERICA?

Watching the news of 2/16/12 and Congressman Issa's panel of men trying to pretend that they were not interested in the birth control insurance coverage issue raised by President Obama but only in the separation of church and state would have been funny except that what they did to legislative processes and what they're after isn't funny. Of course, the ruse didn't work; the pundits had a field day with the lack of women on the panel and the effort to promote the idea that most sexually active Catholics do not use birth control.


But from my window on the world, the pundits missed the best talking point of all: Sharia Law. Mostly male Christian elements in our legislature have previously done and are presently doing exactly what fundamentalist Muslims do when they impose Sharia Law. The rules they seek to impose may differ from Islamic extremism, but there are two important similarities.


Mostly male legislators are trying to make repressive, regressive rules that give them power over women; restrict women's personal privacy, autonomy, and freedom; and make them second class citizens with fewer rights than men in their pursuit of happiness. Imagine how these men would react if the legislature had a female majority and decided to rule that rapists be castrated, that heterosexual men could not (or had to) use condoms, or had to have vasectomies after fathering two children. What if women had the power to legislate that all heterosexual males had to have monthly shots of an anti-hypertensive drug of sufficient dosage to lower sexual drive and ability, whether or not they had high blood pressure, until they could prove to a panel of women their maturity and ability to support and parent children? 


The other similarity is that any legislation involving the issues of contraception or abortion crosses the line separating church and state because religious institutions, which openly seek to guide our morality, have made the private medical issues of contraception and abortion matters of church policy. While these mammoth institutions are free to preach whatever they want from their pulpits, when they weigh in publicly on these issues as they are raised in the political arena and seek to get legislators to support their religious policies, they contaminate what could otherwise be purely philosophical, medical, legal, financial, or political arguments and decisions. They cross the line.


On the political side of that line, it cannot be argued that religious institutions are just special interest groups. Their members make the laws of this land. No matter how the Issas of this Congress want to re-frame the conversation, legislators who declare their Christian faith every election year cannot plead impartiality when medical issues co-opted into religious policies are raised just because it's legislatively convenient. Religious institutions' very public stands and arguments on these issues have muddied the waters, preempting the credibility of any such claim, even for non-Catholics who are Pro-Choice. Their voting records are all public information and they are all elected officials. Morality is not within their legislative purview. If it were, war and capital punishment - murder by the state - would be illegal. 


Let these gentlemen never again point a finger at Muslim extremists to deplore their insistence on promoting Sharia Law to oppress women and deprive them of their rights and freedoms. Their other three fingers point back to their own efforts to promulgate the same male dominance and deprivation of women's rights and freedoms in the land of the free and the home of the brave. This is an abuse of their mandate to uphold the Constitutional freedoms of all citizens of these United States of America, more than 50% of whom are women.


How long, oh Lord, must women continue the fight for freedom and equality?

 Sharia Law in America? by Abby Freeborn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For permission to use, please contact randmxcentric@gmail.com