The House Judiciary Committee in New Hampshire held a hearing yesterday on proposals to overturn the state's gay marriage law, and one particular remark by a witness named Howard Kaufman is getting attention:
"A future redefinition of marriage that permits polygamy would facilitate the introduction an aspect of Sharia or Islamic law that permits a man to have up to four wives."
Hunh? We're going to go from legalizing gay marriage to accepting sharia? If you're a sensible person, that may seem rather, um, counterintuitive. You may assume that only a rare individual would make that mental leap.
Nope. The two ideas are regularly linked on the right. Apparently, in the wingnut brain, the sharia-panic center is very close to the homosexual-panic center.
Last December, we heard about the alleged link from this guy:
Bradlee Dean of the religious ministry You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International believes Rep. Keith Ellison's support for LGBT rights is part of his strategy to bring Sharia law to the United States. On his radio show Saturday, Dean said that members of the LGBT community are fools for supporting Ellison and that the Minnesota Democrat is "adamant about overthrowing the United States Constitution." ...
"I said time and time again that there is a correlation between the Muslims and the homosexual agenda, and we have a couple of fools in the state of Minnesota that are putting a rope around their neck and they just don't realize it," said Dean [audio below]. "Here, let me give it to you this way: Keith Ellison is a Muslim....
"Why is he so adamant about overthrowing the Constitution as it is right now? Because if you pay attention to the plow he's planting the seed," Dean said. "He's trying to come through with Sharee [sic] law." ...
Dean has been praised and prayed for (literally) by Michele Bachmann, and Minnesota's
But this is a common wingnut linkage. On the right there appears to be near-universal acceptance of Stanley Kurtz's notion that legalized polygamy will follow legalized gay marriage as night follows day. (Most who endorse this notion cite the brief popularity of HBO's Big Love, though they never quite get around to explaining why the much greater popularity of The Sopranos didn't lead to widespread legalization of gangland murder.) The gay mariage/polygamy slippery slope is linked to the twin beliefs (also near-universal on the right) that (1) Muslims are taking over and (2) liberals love Islam, even the extremely illiberal parts of it.
Thus you get blog posts like this, from 2006:
Prop 8, Gay Marriage And The Spread Of Islamofascism
You 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....
[Mark] 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?
...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? ...
(Also see this blog post and this one as well, and see this World Net Daily article.)
And when you're not getting lunacy like this from the right, you're getting the likes of this article in The American Spectator, in which Jeffrey Lord argues that the way to stop gay marriage is for right-wingers to endorse sharia -- except (egads!) it may not work!
...So if the strategy of fighting gay marriage in America is failing, what to do? In four words: move to legalize polygamy. And four more: move to legalize Sharia. Now.
... Why? What earthly reason is there to do something as seemingly nuts as this?
... Law suits, proposed legislation and ballot initiatives to legalize polygamy, polyamory and Sharia will sharpen the debate and force liberal activists to play their hand.... Any kind of official nod to Sharia is also giving a nod to the idea that says homosexuality is a crime punishable by death.... Activists ... would be forced to fight these pro-polygamy, polyamory and Sharia lawsuits, legislation and ballot initiatives. Ironically, using their own thinking, in doing so they will instantly cast themselves as "intolerant" of those who are different from themselves. Bigots.
Or... or they will be up front honest and support the legalization of polygamy, polyamory and Sharia. Because, yes indeed, they really do feel just as they say they do.... And would-be polygamists, polyamorists and Sharia supporters ... need and deserve those multicultural favorites: tolerance and justice.
... Forcing the issue of support for polygamy, polyamory and Sharia will force Americans to face a hard reality. If they do not act now, they will wake up one day to find their own marriage worthless in the eyes of the law. With little or no chance of going back. They will also be living in a society where officials, however unintentionally ... , have let loose (among other things) the idea that murdering gays has some kind of official sanction....
These people are nuts. The Gay Marriage-Destroying Menace and the Sharia Menace are the invisible monsters they think are under their beds -- and instead of growing up and realizing that the monsters don't exist, they want us to see them and be scared by them, too.
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