On Friday, PJ Media reported the following:
Everything is bigger in Texas, including the egregious miscarriages of justice. The Blaze reported Wednesday that Collin County, Texas, District Judge Andrea Thompson “effectively denied a U.S. citizen,” a Muslim woman named Mariam Ayad, “her constitutionally protected due process rights, choosing instead to order her to appear before an Islamic tribunal where her testimony is considered inferior. And when her lawyers sounded the alarm — the judge doubled down.” Islamic law, Sharia, taking precedence over U.S. law — in Texas? Celebrate diversity!
Ayad was trying to get a divorce from her husband, Ayad Hashim Latif. Sharia stipulates that while a man can divorce his wife simply by telling her three times that he is divorcing her, a woman has to seek the permission of Muslim clerics and make her case for a divorce before them. There is, of course, no such provision in U.S. law, but when Ayad told Latif that she was going to seek a divorce, he told her that she had signed an Islamic prenuptial agreement that stated the marriage, and any possible divorce, would proceed according to Sharia provisions.
Mariam Ayad contends now that she was tricked into signing this agreement, and thought that what she was signing was something else altogether. Her lawyers state that American law should supersede it in any case. Thompson, however, ruled that the prenuptial agreement was binding, and thus Ayad will have to go through the Islamic Association of North Texas to get permission to divorce. According to The Blaze, this decision was in “complete disregard of both federal and state law.”
This case isn’t over: Ayad is appealing at the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas….
The article goes on to list some of the aspects of Sharia Law that contradict the U.S. Constitution–the Qur’an declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man, the Qur’an teaches that men are superior to women and should beat those from whom they “fear disobedience”, the Qur’an also allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls, the Qur’an rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter. You get the idea. These ideas have no place in America.
The article concludes:
Non-Muslims in several states a few years ago tried to outlaw the elements of Sharia that interfere with Constitutionally protected freedoms, not Islam as an individual religious practice. These anti-Sharia measures were aimed at political Islam, an authoritarian ideology at variance with the Constitution in numerous particulars: Sharia denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law. That is what people wanted to restrict, and the elements of Sharia that contradict Constitutional freedoms were all they want to restrict. But of course these efforts met furious opposition and were denounced as “Islamophobic.”
Meanwhile, Sharia really does deny equality of rights to women. But to oppose that is “racist.” So Mariam Ayad just has to suffer, you see, for diversity.
It’s interesting that the court was willing to embrace Islamic Law, which is in conflict with the U.S. Constitution while at the same time many of our courts are pushing Judeo-Christian laws and values, which are the basis of our Constitution, out of the public square.
