Somebody’s Baby, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

February 24, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 7 Comments

To listen to right wing media, we, as a nation, are in danger of being subject to Sharia Law, the religious rules of Muslim life.  There have been laws passed at the state and local level, especially in the South, to prevent this from ever happening.

Sharia Law should not be the law of the land.  The First Amendment guarantees the separation of church and state, and that separation includes mosques as well.  However, the larger problem for our country at the moment is the interference of other religions into our laws (and therefore, our lives).

Let’s start out with a somewhat ludicrous example: A woman in Idaho was recently arrested for beating up a Jewish acquaintance in an attempt to convert her to Christianity.  She was arrested, and seems to be, for all intents and purposes, completely bonkers.

But …

I don’t see a lot of Christians stepping forward to denounce her behavior, the way Muslims are expected to denounce the behavior of violently crazy people who happen to be Muslim.  There is a long history of Jews being tortured into converting (here, just for one example).  If this woman was Muslim and trying to convert her neighbor to Islam, Fox News would have reporters outside her doorstep, doing live updates 24/7.

Way back in the 1980s, I remember defending my decision to vote for whomever was running against Ronald Reagan (I think this was the Mondale time, but I’m not sure).  I said I didn’t want a President who could appoint judges to the Supreme Court who might overturn Roe v. Wade.  I said, “I don’t want to to before a tribunal every month and explain why I’m not pregnant.”  My friends (social liberals who thought Reagan would save them money in taxes) said that would never happen.  This was at least two years before The Handmaid’s Tale, which was published in 1986.

It might not be happening here, but something too close for comfort is happening in El Salvador.  Women are put in jail for having miscarriages.  It isn’t some odd one-off by mistake, but something that happens over and over again.  In one case recently, a woman was pardoned.

(Let me point out that by accepting a pardon, the woman essentially admits her guilt.  Because a woman who had a miscarriage and then was put in jail for more than five years doesn’t feel badly enough.)

“But that can’t happen here,” you say.  “We don’t put women in jail for losing a baby.”  Except that, with the increasingly fundamentalist mindset of our state legislatures, we may start, at least in Indiana, where a woman was convicted of simultaneously killing a baby and a fetus.  She claims she miscarried.  There is no physical evidence that she took any drugs to cause an abortion.

I know that the people who promote and pass these laws like to think of women as wombs with legs, rather than full-fledged humans with the right to control their own bodies.  In that regard, they are just like ISIL and Al Qaeda.

Sharia Law by any other name …

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, sometimes misses living in the Midwest, but not when this stuff happens.