Thursday, June 18, 2020

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sam Brownback and the GOP's view of "Sharia law"

Trump-adjacent conservative Henry Olsen writes in the Washington Post says Republicans must defeat GOP congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of her conspiracy-mongering views. Part of Olsen's bill of particulars:

Let’s start with her anti-Muslim bigotry. She has said there is an “Islamic invasion” of the U.S. government and that members of Congress should have to be sworn into office on a Bible. She slurred Muslim men, saying they can have sex with “little boys, little girls … [and] marry as many women as they want.” She said Muslims who “want Sharia law” should “stay over there in the Middle East” and “have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.” She said on Wednesday that “Sharia Law” is “a real threat to our nation,” a blatant falsehood since there’s no effort anywhere in this nation to institute it.

Is opposition to Sharia law out of bounds in the Republican Party? If so, that would probably be news to a lot of Republicans. From 2012:

Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.

The law has been dubbed the “sharia bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code. Sharia, or Islamic law, covers all aspects of Muslim life, including religious obligations and financial dealings. Opponents of state bans say they could nullify wills or legal contracts between Muslims.
Brownback, incidentally, is now the "ambassador at large for international religious freedom," because irony is dead. But Kansas wasn't the only state to undertake such an effort. Less than a decade ago, conspiracy thinking about and efforts to ban sharia in the United States were pretty mainstream among conservatives. At one point, as many as 13 states saw bills introduced to ban sharia. Several states adopted the bans. I can't swear that all the bills came from Republicans, but Republicans were the main drivers of that effort.

Those efforts didn't just fade out. Here's Andrew McCarthy at National Review in 2017, arguing that immigration policy should deliberately shut out those he called "sharia supremacists": " To fashion an immigration policy that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the Constitution."

So the idea that Islamic law is a threat to the American way of life was, and appears to remain, a mainstream conservative position. Henry Olsen treats it as disqualifying. Did conservatives change their minds while I wasn't looking, or is Olsen just trying to make the GOP look less nutty than it really is?

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