Why America Can’t Defend Itself Against Sharia Law
There is a great amount of fear that Sharia law will make its way to the United States. Efforts are underway to stop it. What legal/moral standard will be used to determine why Sharia Law should not be implemented? What is the foundation of law in the United States? Does anybody know?
The Constitution doesn’t tell us. The Constitution contains little moral prescription even though Article VI states, “This Constitution . . . shall be the Supreme law of the land.” But there’s not much law, other than procedural law, in the Constitution. It tells us how the national government is to work in terms of authority and its relationship to the states. There are no prohibitions against murder, rape, stealing. These moral prohibitions are assumed.
The Preamble begins with “We the people.” But we’ve seen how the courts have overturned the will of the people on the question of same-sex marriage. More than 30 states have ruled that same-sex marriage should not be permitted. Judges have dismissed the will of the people and the law-making efforts of the legislature.
The framers mistakenly believed that there was no need to acknowledge an independent and objective body of law since natural law — “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” — was almost universally accepted. The belief system was written into the Declaration of Independence and acknowledged in the Constitution.
This is why Clarence Thomas could write: “We look at the Natural Law beliefs of the founders as a background to our Constitution.”1 The left-leaning members of the committee took exception to Thomas’s natural law beliefs. Joseph Biden – yes, that Joseph Biden – wrote an article that appeared in the Washington Post2 in which he claimed the following for his version of natural law:
- It does not “function as being a specific moral code regulating individual behavior.”
- It is not “a static set of unchanging principles.”
- It is “an evolving body of ideals.”
Note Biden’s appeal to evolution. Natural law as it was constructed throughout the centuries died in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “Charles Darwin destroyed natural law theory in biological science. . . . His successors destroyed natural law theory in social science. In the 1920’s, quantum physics destroyed natural law theory in the subatomic world. This immediately began to undermine modern legal theory.”3
Natural Law in the West was formulated by reading the world through the lens of the Bible. Once the Bible was dismissed and evolution accepted, Natural Law had lost its moral foundation. Natural Law became the law of the jungle.
An evolving law means a flexible law that can be manipulated by whoever’s in power. If Muslims gain power in the United States, as they are doing, then they could change America into an Islamic Caliphate bound by Sharia law. Sharia law can advance in the West because Western law is morally bankrupt.
Basically, natural law is whatever those in power say it is. “In our system,” Biden writes, “the sole obligation of a Supreme Court justice is to the Constitution. Natural justice can supply one of the important means of understanding the Constitution, but natural law can never be used to reach a decision contrary to a fair reading of the Constitution itself.”
This is why the Left wants to be the gatekeepers to the Supreme Court by mandating a liberal litmus test to all prospective judges. Biden’s article does not tell us anything about how we determine what’s right or wrong. Morality is a matter of “individual choice.” What happens when two individual choices are in conflict? That’s why we need judges. Who gets to pick the judges? By what standard will the judges judge? Who judges the judges?
Biden’s concept of “good natural law” as opposed to “bad natural law” does not establish a set of “timeless truths” but rather an evolving body of ideals that changes to permit governments to adjust to new social situations. How convenient – for the Muslims.
“In short,” as Phillip E. Johnson notes, Biden’s view of “good natural law doesn’t prevent us from doing anything we really want to do.”4 Biden never explains how he derived the content of this good natural law or how to account for any law at all given Darwinian assumptions taught in our schools and mandated by our courts. Of course, even though natural law theory has its problems, it does recognize the existence of a higher law.
There is no such thing today among most of our nation’s law schools.
Consider what’s happening in Canada. A Nova Scotian law society wanted “to deny future graduates of Canada’s first Christian law school the right to practice because of the college’s position on sexuality.”
“Last spring, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society (NSBS) offered TWU law graduates recognition—but only if the school struck its rules against ‘sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.’”
A provincial court ruled against the law society. That’s today. LGBT will not stop until they win. The day could come when lawyers who do not ascent to the views of the State will not be permitted to serve as lawyers and judges.
Modern Western courts have lost the ability to establish a fixed moral basis for law and morality.
The best defense is a good offense. The courts are destroying that offense with irrational and downright immoral laws.
- “Thomas Spars With Committee over Natural Law and Abortion,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Review, 49:38 (September 21, 1991), 2644. [↩]
- Joseph R. Biden, Jr., “Law and Natural Law: Questions for Judge Thomas,” The Washington Post (September 8, 1991), CB1. [↩]
- Gary North, Political Polytheism (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), xxii. [↩]
- Phillip E. Johnson, “The Modernist Impasse in Law,” God and Culture: Essays in Honor of Carl F. H. Henry, D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 181. [↩]