#7 Zenster, I totally agree with you about making America as Muslim-unfriendly as possible. But I see few legal measures of the sort you describe that would be feasible in the near term.
A federal law outlawing Islam, or even the more limited subset of "political" Islam, would conflict with the core of First Amendment jurisprudence, and it would never survive Supreme Court review, even with nine law-and-order judges. Such a law might survive a 14th Amendment equal protection challenge, if the security situation was bad enough -- but it's unlikely that anything short of full-out blood-and-guts civil war would justify it. Not after Korematsu.
The only possibility along these lines would be to amend the Constitution -- and fat chance of that. It's a cultural issue, one our legal system is totally unequipped to deal with. Never in our nation's history have we been confronted with such a problem, nor can it be easily adapted to.
At the same time, plenty of "content-neutral" legal avenues already exist to make America Muslim-unfriendly, but there is little interest in enforcing them. Much progress could be made if state and federal prosecutors engaged in serious efforts to enforce laws already on the books, such as sedition, incitement to violence, immigration violations, communicating threats, obstruction of justice, hate crimes, money laundering, tax evasion, polygamy, statutory rape, etc. etc.
But again, it's a cultural and political problem: few public officials would be willing to subject themselves to the scrutiny they would necessarily bring upon themselves by engaging in such a crackdown.
One thing I've advocated for several years now is to block the entry of any national of any country on the State Department's list of terrorist-sponsoring nations, for any reason. There were 26 the last time I checked, and most of them were Muslim countries. The Constitution does may not allow viewpoint discrimination, but it certainly does allow exercising control over who we let in.
In general, provisions like this that reinforce US sovereignty would help a lot, without running afoul of First or Fourteenth Amendment considerations.
For Europe, I maintain that burqa-bans aren't the answer. They give the public the illusion of addressing a problem, without actually accomplishing anything toward that end, further entrenching Europe's suicidal complacency. |
About two dozen Muslim women protested Thursday outside the Dutch parliament against a proposed ban on the burqa, the head-to-toe Islamic robe. Several protesters wore long robes and veils exposing only their eyes, known as a niqab. "We live in a free country and the government cannot tell us what to do with our religion," protest organizer Ayse Bayrak told The Associated Press. "We don't live in a dictatorship. We don't live under the Taliban, which oppresses women."