Reports (at "Live" wire , repeated at Salon) are quoting Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach to the effect that the GOP platform has adopted an amendment which addresses Sharia encroachment. Kobach stated,

We see it from the top where the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly quoted foreign law in interpreting our U.S. constitution and it's actually coming in at the bottom as well, it's being raised as an argument in courts around the country. We actually put a provision affecting Kansas statute this year and I think it's important for us to say foreign sources of law should not be used as part of common law decisions or statutory interpretations by judges in the lower state courts as well.

...I'm not aware of any court that's accepted the argument, but in cases involving either spousal abuse or assault or other crimes against persons, sometimes defenses are raised that are based in Sharia law

Despite the predictable sneering and distressing ignorance which frames these reports by two agitprop "journalists," and Kobach's own noble, if incomplete assessment of the profundity of the problem, this is very welcome news.

Kobach referred to Kansas's recently passed law-a version of American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) legislation-which should remind us all that the earliest of these laws (now also passed in Tennessee, Arizona, and Louisiana) have been in effect for several years without being challenged, let alone overturned. David Yerushalmi recently provided a very clear, didactic example of the need for ALAC-style laws, which corrects Kobach's assessment about courts not having accepted Sharia-based arguments.

Yersuhlami described in brief an appellate court decision from Maryland, cited in a Center for Security Policy Study, where

...the court enforced a Pakistani Sharia court's judgment of custody in favor of the father even though the mother had argued that she was not provided due process because had she gone to Pakistan to contest the case, she could have been subject to capital punishment for having a new relationship with a man not sanctioned by sharia.

The salient facts of the case,  and appellate court ruling, were summarized by Yerushalmi as follows:

The Maryland appellate court ruled that since the woman could not prove she'd be executed had she gone to Pakistan to litigate custody in the Pakistan Sharia Court, which is a national-state court in Pakistan, her failure to go to Pakistan and take the risk of execution precluded her from making the void as against public policy argument. ALAC would have provided the Maryland appellate court the legislative clarity to have reversed the lower court's outrageous decision.

Here are the Maryland appellate court's own words, cited by Yerushalmi:

Additionally, appellant [the mother] asserts that the Pakistani custody orders were founded on principles of law repugnant to Maryland public policy because the Pakistani courts allegedly "penalized the mother for not appearing without considering the affect of her admission to adultery on her ability to return to Pakistan." In this regard, appellant points out that if convicted under Pakistani criminal law, her penalty could be public whipping or death by stoning. Although Dr. Malik [the expert] opined that appellant would be arrested for adultery if she returned to Pakistan for the custody proceedings, he also conceded that punishment for adultery was extremely unlikely and that proving the crime was extremely difficult. Given this testimony, the circuit court was not clearly erroneous in not considering the effect of whether appellant's admission to adultery [under sharia] was "repugnant" to Maryland public policy in its failure to find that the Pakistani courts punished her for not appearing."}

Let me summarize for the (hope against hope) edification of  the "Live" wire , and Salon, agitprop journalists, the liberty-crushing, dehumanizing nature of Sharia: open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties-including freedom of conscience and speech-enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption.

I would also point out how the two agitprop journalists steadfastly ignore: ominous polling data from US Muslims; jihad funding trial revelations and the content of more banal Muslim litigation proceedings; mosque surveillance reports; analyses of Islamic education institutions and their Muslim schoolchildren's textbooks; the issuance of obscurantist "fatwas" (Islamic legal rulings) by the respected, mainstream Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America; and an open declaration by one of America's largest mainstream Muslim organizations, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), in its 2010 ICNA Member's Hand Book, which calls for the (re-)creation of a global Muslim Caliphate, and the imposition of Sharia in America.

Notwithstanding the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America's (AMJA's) mainstream acceptance, including uncritical endorsement of its seventh annual American conference in Houston (October 15-18, 2010) to train American imams, AMJA has issued rulings which sanction the killing of apostates (here), "blasphemers" (including non-Muslims guilty of this "crime"; here), or adulterers (by stoning to death, here), and condone marital rape. Even more ominously, another Arabic-language fatwa from AMJA's Dr. Salah Al-Sawy leaves open the possibility for offensive jihad against America and the West, as soon as Muslims are strong enough to do so. When asked whether "the Islamic missionary effort in the West ... [was] to the point where it could take advantage of offensive jihad," Al-Sawy ruled:

The Islamic community does not possess the strength to engage in offensive jihad at this time. With our current capabilities, we are aspiring toward defensive jihad, and to improve our position with regards to jurisprudence at this stage. But there is a different discussion for each situation. Allah Almighty knows best.

Just six months ago (3/14/12), Translating Jihad put what one might wish to deem as these circumscribed, "purely Islamic" rulings, in a more disturbing-and entirely unacceptable, seditious context. AMJA's own words make plain the organization's long term commitment to superseding the US legal code with its antithesis, a Sharia-based system.

Judge Billings Learned Hand (1872-1961) was a US  judge and judicial philosopher. Hand served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and subsequently the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge Hand has the distinction of having been quoted more often than any other lower-court judge by legal scholars and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Apropos to the phenomenon of encroaching Sharia, and my training as a physician to be attuned to early, treatable  manifestations of potentially catastrophic illnesses, I re-read Judge Hand's 1950 opinion from United States v. Dennis, I83 F.2d 20I, 2I3 (2d Cir. 1950). The case involved Communist agitation designed to violently impose a new "utopian" order in America. Hand's discussion included a little known, if clear-eyed, direct analogy between ancient Islamic and modern Communist totalitarianism, which contained a specific reference to Islam's inherent militancy.

In his famous conclusion (from paragraph 51), Judge Hand states,

It is of course possible that the defendants are inspired with the fanatical conviction that they are in possession of the only gospel which will redeem this sad Planet and bring on a Golden Age. If so, we need not consider how far that would justify the endless stratagems to which they resorted; and it is not for us to say whether such a prosecution makes against the movement or, on the contrary, only creates more disciples; ours is only to apply the law as we find it. Once the question is answered whether the Smith Act is valid, and whether there was evidence before the jury from which they might hold it violated, we can find no privilege and no right denied them which had substance. We know of no country where they would have been allowed any approach to the license here accorded them; and none, except Great Britain, where they would have had so fair a hearing. Their only plausible complaint is that that freedom of speech which they would be the first to destroy, has been denied them. We acknowledge that that freedom is not always easy to protect; and that there is no sharp line which marks its scope. We have tried to show that what these men taught and advocated is outside the zone..

Earlier, in paragraph 15, Judge Hand, describing the font of militant global Communism, Communist Soviet Russia, made this direct analogy:

By far the most powerful of all the European nations [Russia] had been a convert to Communism for over thirty years; its leaders were the most devoted and potent proponents of the faith; no such movement in Europe of East to West had arisen since Islam.

Contemperaneously, Bernard Lewis, still considered by many to be their doyen of living Western Islamic scholars, validated Judge Hand's analogy. Lewis, in his 1954 essay "Communism and Islam," expounded upon on the quintessence of totalitarian Islam, and how it was antithetical in nature to Western democracy, while sharing important features of Communist totalitarianism - most notably, global domination via jihad.

We must regain the thoughtful sobriety of Judge Learned Hand, and other intellectuals of that era if we are to preserve our hard won freedoms from the modern scourge of ancient Islamic totalitarianism, resurgent-including within the United States, as directed by "religious leaders" cum seditious "legists," such as the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America.  The Republican platform rejecting Sharia encroachment is an appropriate, sorely needed step in the right direction.