Roger Cohen, in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, goes to Oklahoma to discover why the state decided to ban shari’ah and attempt to abrogate the Constitution. The key section, in my opinion, is when Cohen states “Shari’ah is the new hot-button wedge issue, as radicalizing as abortion or gay marriage, seized on by Republicans to mobilize conservative Americans against the supposed ‘stealth jihad’ of Muslims in the United States and against a Democratic president portrayed as oblivious to—or complicit with—the threat.”
The creation of this wedge issue divorces shari’ah from any semblance of reality. The latest entry in the category of Stupid Shari’ah Tricks is a minister in Oklahoma who accuses of Rep. Keith Ellison of imposing “sharee” by stealth because he supports equal rights for homosexuals.
Now, one of the great talking points to get liberals to stop supporting Muslims is that shari’ah is opposed to homosexuality. This point is generally true. Most traditional religious law, Muslim or otherwise, condemns homosexual acts. Like most other traditions, it is a highly contested issue amongst Muslims. The point is that Minister Bradlee Dean has so confused his bogeymen, he can no longer keep the issues straight. Dean mentions lynching with respect to Ellison, and then says that Ellison “wants to bring in Sharee [sic] law through the homosexual agenda!” Dean is collapsing the “homosexual agenda,” “creeping shari’ah,” “stealth jihad,” and “fear of a black planet” into one giant mess of paranoia and conspiracy theories.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the constant “othering” of people within the U.S. will have real consequences. The definition of what it means to be American will become narrower and narrower. “They” never stopped coming for blacks. “They” never stopped coming for the LGBT community. “They” are now coming for the Muslims. At some point, we will need to face the real damage this politicization of religion is doing to the country.
