Religious freedom Oklahoma style: Free for me, but not for thee | Opinion
Well, you have to hand it to the Islamophobes of Oklahoma. They’re a persistent bunch.
It’s been about three weeks since the Tulsa suburb of Broken Arrow rejected plans by local Muslims to build a mosque on land they own.
City Council members said they unanimously voted it down because of land-use issues and it had nothing to do with the fact that hundreds of residents wrote or testified in person as to why they think Muslims are terrorists, heretics and/or demons of Satan, who are trying to take over and impose Sharia Law on the God-fearing Christian patriots of Broken Arrow and the state of Oklahoma at large.
So now, the buzzy buzz at the Oklahoma Capitol is a bill to put a constitutional amendment before the state’s voters that would “prohibit the use of (Islamic) Sharia Law or any similar foreign legal code in Oklahoma courts.”
The measure was read into the Legislature on Monday as House Joint Resolution 1040. Thirty legislators — all Republicans — immediately signed on as co-authors.
Its original author was one Rep. Gabe Woolley from, you guessed it, Broken Arrow.
Whose rights are getting trampled again?
Woolley put out a press release spouting the same claptrap about Islam as his constituents did during hours of hearings on the mosque plan. It pretty much exposes the lie that denying the mosque had anything to do with traffic and sewers.
I’m a big fan of irony, and apparently Rep. Woolley is too.
How else to explain this statement he released: “One group does not have permission to trample on the rights of others. We cannot jeopardize our constitutional rights by allowing a political ideology to infiltrate our nation and our state.”
So far the only constitutional rights being jeopardized here are the 1st Amendment rights of Oklahoma Muslims to practice freedom of religion.
Oklahoma’s been down this road and the result was disastrous.
State voters passed a Sharia ban in 2010 and a Muslim guy sued. A district judge and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the measure was unconstitutional because it targeted a specific religion for no good reason, and the state had to pony up $303,000 for the plaintiff’s legal fees.
That’s a pretty good chunk of change.
It would have been enough to buy 5,050 Donald Trump-endorsed “God Bless the USA” Bibles for mandatory placement and use in Oklahoma’s public schools. I use that example because it was another religiously unconstitutional act recently attempted by Oklahoma state government, which runs either the 48th or 50th best school system in the nation, depending on which rankings you’re looking at.
And speaking of “allowing a political ideology to infiltrate our nation and our state,” Woolley seems to think that with Trump in the White House, constitutional rights are optional except for him and other MAGA supporters.
“With a new administration and 16 years having passed, I believe it is time to attempt this ban once again to protect our American way of life in Oklahoma,” Woolley said.
Interestingly enough, no one has tried to impose Sharia Law in Oklahoma during those 16 years.
Who needs doctors?
Truth be told, if Muslims really wanted to play a dirty trick on Oklahoma, they’d all pack up one dark night and leave.
As in Kansas, a disproportionately high number of Oklahoma Muslims are physicians, dentists and other medical professionals. Many of them volunteer at their mosques’ free clinics, providing health care to the poor and the homeless, regardless of religious affiliation.
Among the states, Oklahoma ranks 48th in the nation in doctors, at 209 per 100,000 population.
That’s a worse shortage than we have here in Kansas — 236 doctors per 100,000 residents, 39th in the nation.
So if they came up here, it would help solve everyone’s problem.
Kansas would make progress on solving our doctor shortage. Here in Wichita, we’re in the process of building a health-care corridor with a new college of osteopathic medicine and a ginormous $300 million Biomedical Campus to support Wichita State and University of Kansas health education programs and research. We can use all the medical professionals we can get.
Oklahoma Muslims would probably like it better here. We’ve had a large Islamic Center in Wichita for decades, and it peacefully coexists with the primarily Christian population. We do have an anti-Sharia law, (embarrassing and probably also unconstitutional) passed in 2012 during the heyday of former Gov. Sam Brownback, but nobody I know of has ever brought it up since. Brownback resigned as governor to serve as Trump’s U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, which, given his opinion of the world’s second-largest religion, makes that another of life’s little ironies.
The good Christian nationalists of Oklahoma, meanwhile, would get rid of a bunch of people they irrationally hate and fear. So as they stand in line with bad teeth waiting for medical care they may or may not get, they could brag about being in the top 50 among the states in doctor-patient ratio and education — and top 10 in religious bigotry and owning the libs.
As Donald Trump would say: “So much winning!”
