Sharia: Iraq's Dark Cloud

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jacoby21mar21,0,3367995.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Sharia: Iraq's Dark Cloud
An Islamic constitution is huge peril.

By Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby is the author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (Metropolitan Books, 2004) and director of the Center for Inquiry-Metro New York.

March 21, 2005

One of the more disturbing byproducts of the U.S. involvement in Iraq is the recent outpouring of rationalization from across the American political and cultural spectrum for the incorporation of Islam into the new Iraqi constitution.

There's nothing particularly surprising about such rationalizing on the right. Vice President Dick Cheney responded predictably to January's Iraqi election, which expanded the power of Shiite religious parties, with the declaration that "we have a great deal of confidence in where they're headed." What else is an architect of the war going to say?

On the Christian right, such reactions are even more understandable; these are the very people who routinely denigrate America's own constitutional separation of church and state. Why should they worry if the new Iraqi government prevents a woman from divorcing without her husband's consent and gives her legal testimony only half the weight of a man's? As long as the Iraqis steer clear of a Saudi-style ban on all other forms of worship (read Christianity), a religion-based Iraqi constitution poses no logical obstacle for U.S. fundamentalists.

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The sad and disgraceful common strand running through the many rationalizations for an Islam-based Iraqi constitution is an implicit and, in the case of the Bush administration, explicit denial of the importance of secular Enlightenment values in American history. Without the administration's constant political drumbeat equating U.S. patriotism with religious faith, it would be much harder to argue on behalf of theocracy in other cultures.

If we fail to honor the secular side of our civic heritage at home, it certainly follows that we cannot object to majority-rule theocracy abroad

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I so agree!