Now let's try substituting "halakha" for "sharia." Halakha is the large body of Jewish law by which rabbinical authorities have for a couple of millennia sought to regulate the religious and civic behavior of the Jewish people. Some of it is more authoritative, some less, and new rulings get issued by different rabbinic powers that be. If he wants to find Saudi-like examples of it, Gingrich should check out Israel's haredim, who are hard at work these days trying to undermine the equal status of women, to say nothing of issuing fatwas against Jews working with and selling real estate to non-Jews. Not very modern.
I think it would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up sharia. I am totally opposed to sharia law being accepted by any court in the United States. In fact, I favor a federal law that preempts it, and says sharia law will not be used in any court in the United States. And this is a very fundamental question...
We have a friend in Arizona who serves in the U.S. Navy, who's a medical doctor, who's Muslim, but who's a totally modern person trying to find ways to bring Islam into modernity...
It depends entirely on the person. If they are a modern person integrated into the modern world and prepared to recognize all religions that's one thing. On the other hand, if they are the Saudis who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow either a Jew or Christian to worship in Saudi Arabia, that's something different...
But within that framework, a truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat. On the other hand, a person who belonged to any kind of belief in sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat.
On the other hand, there's the aforementioned Joe Lieberman, a more or less modern individual who observes the Sabbath, keeps kosher, and generally, as Newt would say, belongs to some kind of belief in halakha. I don't know whether Newt would ever have supported Lieberman's presidential aspirations, but I'm inclined to think that he wouldn't consider them a mortal threat to the republic.
Support for presidential candidates aside, Gingrich's sharia preemption law would not only be unconstitutional (as a federal judge in Oklahoma recently made abundantly clear), it represents precisely the kind of war on religion that he (along with Rick Santorum and Rick Perry) have been heatedly charging the Obama Administration with conducting. What is the ministerial exception to employment law but judicial recognition of a particular faith's right to use its own rules to determine who's in charge?
If the Free Exercise clause means anything, it means the right of Americans not to be a modern person integrated into the modern world, whatever that means. Gingrich's personal religious test for presidential office is about as un-American as it gets.

Religious identity doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to voting in New Hampshire, as demonstrated by a 
Recent Comments