Posted on 09/16/2010 1:48:29 AM PDT by Rashputin
What Are D.C. Police Doing Enforcing Shariah Law?
Police officers, at the direction of an imam, remove six Muslim women from the Islamic Center. Their crime? Worshiping peacefully.
The Islamic Center, housed in a magnificent building in Washington, D.C., has been around for over a half-century, but it is seldom in the news. Unless you drive by (on Embassy Row) you would not know that it there. Because it is supposed to be a peaceful place of worship, we would not expect local police to enter.
Yet last March they did. Three D.C. Metropolitan police officers entered the center, at the direction of an imam, and removed six Muslim women. Their crime? They were worshiping peacefully in the main prayer hall after the imam announced that women were forbidden to enter that area.
What happened in Washington, D.C., should remind us of the peaceful sit-ins of the 1960s. The courts found that the police action removing people from private businesses violated the Equal Protection Clause.
In a series of cases the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court reversed convictions of black and white civil protestors who were convicted under state criminal trespass or disturbing the peace laws when they sat in the “white-only” section of various lunch counters and restaurants and refused to move after having been ordered to do so by the agent of the establishment.
Neither state nor federal laws at the time required the restaurants to serve blacks, but the courts found “state action” that violated Equal Protection. In Garner v. Louisiana (1961), for example, the Supreme Court reversed the convictions (under a state disturbing the peace statute) of those who had engaged in a sit-in, because the record was “totally devoid of evidentiary support” that petitioners caused any disturbance of the peace. They sat there quietly.
Peterson v. Greenville (1963) reversed the trespass conviction of blacks who had engaged in a lunch counter sit-in. The store manager asked the blacks to leave because integrated service was “contrary to local customs” and a local ordinance. The Supreme Court held that “these convictions cannot stand,” whether or not a local ordinance supported the store manager. In Lombard v. Louisiana (1963), decided the same day, the Court reversed the trespass convictions of three blacks and one white who had sat in a privately owned restaurant that served only whites. The case involved no statutes or ordinances, but the police did say that “no additional sit-in demonstrations … will be permitted.” Justice Douglas, concurring, argued that there was state action when the state judiciary “put criminal sanctions behind racial discrimination in public places.”
There are precious little differences between the sit-in cases of the 1960s and the Muslim sit-in cases. We knew, in the 1960s, that the Equal Protection Clause forbids discrimination based on color. We know now that the Equal Protection Clause forbids discrimination based on gender. We know that the lunch counters were open to anyone who wanted to eat, except blacks, or blacks had to sit at a special section. We know that the mosque is open to anyone who wants to worship God, except that women must sit at special places — sort of like “back of the bus.”
And we know that the discrimination based on race or sex could not exist without the help of the local police. The question is why the D.C. police — who have real crime to worry about – are spending their time and taxpayer dollars to enforce sharia law.
Our First Amendment protects the right of people to believe whatever they want to believe. But there are limits to how they can act on their beliefs. For example, a religion may believe that racial segregation is God’s way. They can believe that, but the state cannot aid that belief by, for example, giving federally subsidized loans to colleges that discriminate on the basis of race. The people of Washington, D.C., should not be enforcing shariah law.
Ronald Rotunda is the Doy & Dee Henley Chair and Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the Chapman University School of Law.
No. What I'm asserting is that people who are on private property are on that private property either by invitation, or without invitation. If they are there without an invitation because they either never had one to begin with, or because it was rescinded, then they are by definition - a trespasser.
You - and the author of this article - keep trying to make this a about religion. It's has NOTHING to do with religion, and everything to do with the rights of the private property owner, or his designee.
In this case, the Imam was either the owner of the mosque, or he was the legally recognized agent of the mosque. It's his prerogative to say who stays, and who goes. The police will ALWAYS respect the wishes of the private property owner.
Liberty rights and property rights, and by extention life... (of the Declaration's trio, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which includes property)") are protected by traditional American statutory and common-law trespass laws, totally well stated by OldDeckHand.
If one can't understand something as basic and fundamental to liberty as private property rights, one really shouldn't be commenting on legal issues at all.
I do wonder how long Islam itself can be recognized with the legal fiction of being merely a religion--when it is, demonstrably and historically--first and foremost--a social/political system....but that is an entirely different issue from the application of centuries-old trespass laws on legally owned private property.
If the mosque can't get these women to comply with their religious customs by persuasion, they should revoke their membership (if mosques have formal memberships) and tell them they are no longer welcome in that mosque. The church or mosque should be required to exhaust its persuasion and sanctions before these situations are even remotely considered to be illegal trespass under the law.
So tell us, if members of a protestant church where Sunday School classes are divided by age and sex have members who will not go to their designated class, should the pastor call the cops?
And, again, no one provides either specific statutes or court cases that address this very specific situation. So I guess you guys have some ESP that enables you to foresee how courts would rule on very specific situations.
So, tell us precisely how SCOTUS will eventually rule on all the lawsuits involving Obamacare.
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