Appearing on the television program of ACT! for America, Frank Gaffney called on the US to arrest and prosecute anyone for practicing Sharia law, the legal code of Islam. Gaffney of the far-right Center for Security Policy previously suggested that President Obama is a secret Muslim and that radical Muslims are engineering a takeover of the conservative movement. The Conservative Political Action Conference refused to give Gaffney a platform “because they didn’t want to be associated with a crazy bigot,” according to a CPAC organizer.
Speaking to ACT! for America’s leader Brigitte Gabriel, who believes Obama is a Muslim backed by terrorist groups and demanded that colleges ban the Muslim Students Association, Gaffney said that anyone who practices Sharia should be prosecuted for Sedition:
Gabriel: But a lot of people say that Sharia law is a religious practice, and maybe it should be protected by the First Amendment. Can you please tell us, is it compatible with the Constitution? Should it be protected by the First Amendment as a religious practice?
Gaffney: It is the law of the land in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and anyone who thinks that life is like in either of those two countries is the same as life in America obviously doesn’t nothing about Saudi Arabia or Iran. In fact, it is absolutely antithetical, Sharia is, to our Constitution, and the pursuit of it you said in your comment is incompatible with the Constitution’s Article VI, and therefore being a protected religious practice, it is an impermissible act of sedition, which has to be prosecuted under our Constitution.
Gaffney isn’t the first right-wing leader to say that Muslims shouldn’t be given constitutional protections, and his comments echo a push in state legislatures to ban the non-existent use of Sharia law in courts and an effort in Tennessee to criminalize the practice of Sharia. As Intisar Rabb of Boston College Law School notes, the Tennessee bill could make it “a felony for Muslims to perform everyday religious practices like praying, giving to charity, or fasting because they would be defined as banned Sharia practices.”
