Brigitte Gabriel, the head of the anti-Muslim group ACT! for America, repeated her view last week that Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who berated Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention, cannot be both a devout Muslim and follow the Constitution.
In an August 19 interview with Tamara Scott, an Iowa Religious Right activist and Republican National Committee member, Gabriel declared that Khan was either lying about being Muslim or about following the Constitution.
“When Khizr Khan shook the Constitution at Donald Trump and challenged him,” Scott asked, “and yet Hillary and Obama have both taken oaths to protect it and they’ve trampled all over it, can Khizr Khan even uphold it himself with the letters he’s written, the papers he’s written about Sharia law, which they believe oversteps any other law?” (These claims come from a debunked article by a pair of far-right activists.)
Gabriel replied that a “practicing Muslim cannot with good conscience say he puts the Constitution over Sharia law, otherwise he’s not a practicing Muslim.”
“So he’s lying either way,” she said, “he’s either a practicing Muslim or he is not. If he is not a practicing Muslim, then the Constitution is the law above all laws that governs everybody, just like we believe that, but a practicing Muslim cannot with good conscience hold the Constitution and say that he abides by the Constitution and lives by the Constitution because, according to Sharia law, which every devout Muslim follows, the Constitution is a man-made law and it cannot be follow.”
