Chris Powell: Alarming signs that Muslim immigration threatens Americans' rights

The Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam.

Political correctness tells Connecticut that Muslims here want only to live normal lives in the state's pluralistic society, and surely some do. Based on this assumption, Gov. Dan Malloy and other leaders support admission of more refugees from the religious and tribal wars of the Islamic world.

But even the politically correct may acknowledge, as President Obama does, that there is a war within Islam between modern and medieval factions, and that the medieval faction construes Islam to require the oppression of women and homosexuals, even the murder of the latter. So which side are Connecticut's Muslims on?

Journal Inquirer reporter Anthony Branciforte recently tried to find out, and the results were disturbing

South Windsor Town Council member Saud Anwar, a candidate for state representative, readily proclaimed himself in favor of equal rights for all. But two Muslim clerics, Kashif Abdul-Karim, of the Muhammad Islamic Center of Greater Hartford, and Hafiz Saeed Ul Hassan, of the Al-Noor Islamic Center in Ellington, were equivocal, expressing situational morality.

Abdul-Karim said Muslims should follow the laws of their country but that, in countries with Muslim majorities, oppressing women and homosexuals in the name of Islam is OK. Ul Hassan was OK with oppressing homosexuals and would not respond to a question about women’s rights under Islam.

Thus the imams implied that more Muslim immigration to the United States indeed would jeopardize the rights of women and homosexuals and religious liberty generally.

More disturbing still, 10 Islamic organizations in Connecticut would not respond at all to the newspaper's questions about Islam's application to women and homosexuals: the Islamic Center of Connecticut, Bayt Ui Mamur Mosque, the Muslim Coalition of Connecticut, the Connecticut chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Association of Greater Hartford, the Islamic Association of Southern Connecticut, United Muslim Mosque, Al-Madany Islamic Center, Daar-ul-Ehsaan, and the Islamic Center of Vernon.

Of course, Judaism and Christianity, preceding Islam by centuries, went through their own long fascist phases, and any modernizing of Islam may take more centuries of butting up against liberty, a struggle in which the United States should assist Islam's reform faction.

But when most Muslim leaders either oppose or refuse to commit themselves to the basic norms of a democratic, pluralistic, and secular society, there already has been far too much Muslim immigration. The United States doesn't need to import more religious fanatics; it has enough of the domestic kind.

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Justice Peter T.  Zarella, who will retire from the  Connecticut Supreme Court at the end of the year, is being described as the court's most "conservative" judge because of his dissent from its decisions that overthrew capital punishment and required the state to recognize same-sex marriage.

That description is false insofar as it implies that Zarella supported capital punishment and opposed same-sex marriage by themselves. Rather, like others who were appalled by these particular decisions, Zarella held that the issues were properly to be decided by ordinary legislation and were not pre-empted by Connecticut's Constitution.

Indeed, the state constitution explicitly recognizes capital punishment, the decision overthrowing it was a crude contrivance, and if, when the current constitution was adopted in 1965, anyone had suggested that it required same-sex marriage, he would have been urged to commit himself to a mental hospital.

No, while Zarella's politics may be conservative, on the court he was conservative mainly insofar as he followed the law, precedent, the plain meaning of words, and the separation of the powers of government. Unfortunately the term for that now is "antique."

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Our Humpty Dumpty courts

MANCHESTER, Conn. From all the cheering and hissing that greeted the Supreme Court's decisions about the Affordable Care Act -- "Obamacare" -- and same-sex marriage, it seemed as if the issues before the court were elections or even football games, not judicial matters.

That has been the problem with appellate courts for some time now, their tendency to act as unelected legislatures, deciding policy, decisions properly cheered or hissed, rather than interpreting constitutions and laws, a dispassionate undertaking quite separate from policymaking.

In the "Obamacare" decision, even Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court's majority sustaining the law, acknowledged that it was full of "inartful drafting" requiring the majority to reach for "context" elsewhere in the law so that "established by the state" could be construed to mean "established by the state or federal government." To prevent a vast, new edifice of government from collapsing abruptly under its flaws, the court's majority decided that the law didn't really mean what it said.

Those gratified by the Obamacare decision did not seem to worry that the court's conclusion -- that laws don't always mean what they say -- might someday be invoked to their disadvantage.

As for same-sex marriage, public attitudes have changed dramatically in its favor.

Laws against same-sex intimacy long have been invalidated as invasions of privacy, based only on arbitrary religious objections, and there is little in marriage that same-sex couples have not been able to arrange through ordinary contract law.

Much if not most of the argument against same-sex marriage arises only from those arbitrary religious objections, which aren't really arguments at all.

As a practical matter lately the issue has been only whether all governments and commerce should have to ratify homosexuality.

But the weakness of the argument against same-sex marriage as policy has nothing to do with whether the Constitution requires states to authorize it. Further, equal-protection claims for a constitutional right to same-sex marriage are themselves weak, since no person or class was being denied the right to marry. Everyone was free to marry someone of the opposite sex, even if sexual identity itself lately seems to have fallen into question.

The same-sex marriage case may have been a good example of the conflict between the two major schools of constitutional law, the "originalist" and the "living constitution" schools.

The originalists hold that constitutions must be interpreted to mean what they meant at the time of their enactment, or else they aren't really constitutions at all.

The advocates of a "living constitution" hold that constitutions should be adapted to new circumstances without formal amendment through the democratic process, the adaptation done by judges, largely unelected.

Through the years political liberals and conservatives have inhabited both schools, but small-d democrats tend to favor the originalist school, while totalitarians everywhere favor the "living constitution" school, for reasons that Lewis Carroll, in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," explained as well as anyone has explained them in the 150 years since:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

The "Obamacare" and same-sex marriage decisions suggest that Justice Dumpty would feel right at home on the Supreme Court.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.