Y
ou know the old saying, “Gays and Islamofascists don’t mix.” Funny, yes, but there really is a nexus: If California’s Prop 8 fails and gay marriage remains the law of the land here, look for the Golden State to become the address of choice for America’s Islamofascist population.
Islamofascists, or Islamists as I prefer to call them, don’t want to be bothered with Judeo-Christian laws and traditions that get in the way of their living the Koran in their daily lives. That means more than just not wanting any toilets around that face toward Mecca; it means being able to live out their misogynistic “right” to polygamous marriage.
Muslims, and particularly Islamists, have a way of using local laws – laws they dislike for not being Sharia – to their advantage. For example, Mark Steyn writes about some welfare law wrangling that’s gone on in the UK:
You can’t (for the moment) marry multiple wives within the United Kingdom, but if you contract a polygamous marriage in a jurisdiction where polygamy is legal, such as certain, ahem, Muslim countries, your better halves (or better eighths?) are now recognized as eligible for British welfare payments. Thus, the concept of “each additional spouse” has been accepted both de facto and de jure.
And elsewhere in Europe:
Thousands of polygamous marriages like Hadi’s have sprung up throughout Italy as a byproduct of a fast-paced and voluminous immigration by Muslims to this Roman Catholic country.
Despite the obvious culture clash, Italian authorities largely turn a blind eye, leaving women in a murky semi-clandestine world with few rights and no recourse when things go especially badly, as they did in Hadi’s case. …
Italy is one of several European nations faced with the issue of polygamy. In Britain and Spain, where large Muslim communities have also settled, some officials favor recognizing polygamous marriage as a way to ensure the wives’ access to pensions, medical care and other state benefits.
Steyn details at length in America Alone how Islamists and their hard to find but supposedly still around somewhere more moderate Muslim brethren have used Europe’s open society and namby-pamby multiculturalism to exploit laws protecting gay rights to make inroads toward the legalization of polygamous marriage. After all, if a man can marry a man, why can’t a man marry three women?
Charles Krauthammer explained the logic in a 2006 WaPo column, Pandora and Polygamy:
In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.
This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I’m not the one who put them there. Their argument does.
He concludes the piece with what I forsee as the rallying cry of CAIR as it begins to hurl petrodollars by the barrel at California legislators in the days that would follow the rejection of Prop 8:
[D]on’t tell me that we can make one radical change in the one-man, one-woman rule and not be open to the claim of others that their reformation be given equal respect.
Todd Zywicki, writing at Volokh, made a similar if more inscrutable point:
Here’s my thought–the definition of marriage as one man and one woman seems somewhat arbitrary, which is why it is difficult to justify. The primary justification I can see is a Hayekian one of prudential deference to tradition unless there is an extremely strong case for rejecting it. I would distinguish this from what I would understand as a Burkean objection, which I would read as tradition being prescriptive, rather than prudential. But whether this is an accurate distinction is probably a debate for a different day.
So the question is, if you get rid of the “man-woman” prong as largely arbitrary, why does this not lead to getting rid of the “one-one” prong as well? It seems like the new line is just as arbitrary as the old one.
Indeed. And California is just the place for this to happen.
California has liberal courts and, with Massachusetts, the nation’s longest gay rights tradition. It has a liberal legislature that is prone to writing state laws in the name of multiculturalism and inclusion. One doesn’t have to be a gay rocket scientist to see that in the blink of an eye, gay marriage in California will lead to a very Sharia-like polygamous marriage in California. And if that happens and you happen to be a jihad-hungry, woman-deriding Islamist living in Kansas or Kentucky, what state would you head for?
In a closing footnote, it’s interesting that you could take this argument entirely the other way: If Prop 8 passes, it will open the door to polygamous marriage. That’s a favorite red herring of the No on 8 set, who argue that because the proposition calls for the enthroning in our state constitution of a definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman – instead of one man and one woman – it’s all just a Mormon conspiracy to turn California into Warren Jeffs‘ new hang-out.
Chilling. It looks like either way, the Islamists could win.
