Oklahoma State Senator Rex Duncan (R) is pushing for a ballot measure that would prohibit courts from considering international or sharia law when deciding cases. He says the measure is a "preemptive strike" against "liberal judges" who want to "undermine those founding principles" of America.
The "Save Our State" amendment would require Oklahoma courts to use state and federal laws only when ruling, and Duncan explained on MSNBC today that he wants to ensure "that our courts are not used to undermine those founding principles, and turn Oklahoma into something that our founding fathers and our great grandparents wouldn't recognize."
He said that "Oklahomans recognize that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles," and that his measure "is a pre-emptive strike to make sure that liberal judges don't take to the bench in an effort to use their position to undermine" those principles by considering international or sharia law.
When asked if there was a danger of judges doing this, Duncan maintained that though it hasn't happened yet, "it's not just a danger. It's a reality."
"This is a war for the survival of America," he said.
Well, America was founded on a number of different principles, some of the Judeo-Christian, some of them not. (Last time I checked, Roman republicanism was neither Jewish nor Christian.) But if there's a danger of the imposition of theocratic rule in America today, it comes not from liberals (who, last time I checked, tend to be proponents of civil liberties and the separation of church and state) but from conservatives, from those on the right who seek to impose Christian fundamentalism (akin to Islamic fundamentalism) on the country, if not on the rest of the world.
Furthermore, the opposition to international law, and the fear that America will succumb to some one-world government, stems from pure paranoia. We've heard this sort of thing from a number of crazy right-wingers, including Michele Bachmann, and it's basically one of the drivers of the Tea Party "movement" (as when the teabaggers took over the Maine GOP last month). And yet it's conservatives, not liberals, who promote the de facto rule of multi-national corporations and an international oligarchy of plutocratic insiders, and it is this corporatism that poses a threat to American sovereignty, not some make-believe international liberal cabal.
And if it's un-American activist judges you want, look no further than Republican appointees to the federal bench. They may claim to be defenders of "original intent," of the Founders' principles, but what they really want is to impose their illiberal partisan ideology on the country -- for example, by undermining civil liberties and the separation of church and state, by interpreting the Constitution as a fundamentalist Christian moral code, and by expanding executive authority at the expense of the other branches of government.
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