The lefty legal freakout over the Supreme Court’s Carson v. Maykin ruling continues. This time it’s Noah Feldman.
The Supreme Court Has Just Eroded First Amendment Law – In an important church-and-state decision, the justices have effectively ended the centuries-old constitutional ban on direct state aid to the teaching of religion, Noah Feldman/Bloomberg.
In an extremely important church-and-state decision, the Supreme Court has held that if the state of Maine decides to pay for a child’s private education in lieu of a public one, it must allow its tuition money to be used at religious schools. The 6-3 decision, Carson v. Makin, profoundly undermines existing First Amendment law.
It represents the end of the centuries-old constitutional ban on direct state aid to the teaching of religion. And remarkably, it does all this in the name of religious liberty, giving the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment primacy over the establishment clause found in the exact same amendment.
As Feldman knows quite well, Carson v. Maykin doesn’t ‘establish’ religion. All it does, like most church-state legal decisions, ban discrimination against religion.
What does establish religion is Sharia law. And Feldman famously endorsed Islamic theocracy in a New York Times Magazine article titled, “Why Sharia”.
“To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed,” Feldman bemoaned. “In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world “
“In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of Shariah has undergone an extraordinary revival in recent years. A century ago, forward-looking Muslims thought of Shariah as outdated, in need of reform or maybe abandonment. Today, 66 percent of Egyptians, 60 percent of Pakistanis and 54 percent of Jordanians say that Shariah should be the only source of legislation in their countries. Islamist political parties, like those associated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, make the adoption of Shariah the most prominent plank in their political platforms. And the message resonates. Wherever Islamists have been allowed to run for office in Arabic-speaking countries, they have tended to win almost as many seats as the governments have let them contest. The Islamist movement in its various incarnations — from moderate to radical — is easily the fastest growing and most vital in the Muslim world; the return to Shariah is its calling card,” Feldman gushed.
“For many Muslims today, living in corrupt autocracies, the call for Shariah is not a call for sexism, obscurantism or savage punishment but for an Islamic version of what the West considers its most prized principle of political justice: the rule of law.”
In Feldman’s world, Sharia theocracy is a wonderful Islamist democratic constitutional movement, but religious equality in America is a theocratic threat.
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