KUDOS TO FLORIDA! House Civil Justice Subcommittee approves Anti-Sharia Bill

Terror-linked CAIR goons are fuming.

From Bare Naked Islam 

 

 

From a CAIR-Florida press release today:

“Islamophobes” in the Florida state legislature think that the third is a charm.

After anti-Shariah legislation was killed and defeated in 2011 and 2012, Florida lawmakers Larry Metz and Alan Hays are at it again, peddling laws to restrict OUR religious freedom.
These cleverly-worded bills focus on family law, but are targeted specifically against Muslims and impact the religious family laws of everyone—Muslims, Christians and Jews. If passed, these anti-Shariah laws would restrict and/or deny the use of religious law for matters involving marriage, divorce, and child custody.
 
Florida state senators Alan Hays and Greg Evers have sponsored SB 58: Application of Foreign Law in Certain Cases. Florida representative Larry Metz sponsored the companion HB 351. We need your help to defeats these bills.
 
 “The Legislature’s leadership should block this legislation because it is legally unwarranted and morally abhorrent,” said David Barkey, counsel for Anti-Defamation League, in the Tampa Tribune.
 
Do not allow state legislators to use the politics of hate and foxy ploys to limit your religious freedoms. It was your support that defeated anti-Shariah laws in years past. In 2013… prejudice and bigotry have no place in our country.”
The movement to ban the practices of the Muslim faith, or Sharia, is an unconstitional assault on our religious liberty. CAIR Florida has defeated the effort to ban sharia and thereby restrict religious freedom in 2010 and 2011.

 

 

Sunshine State News  One of the most controversial pieces of legislation confronting the 2013 session passed the Florida House Civil Justice Subcommittee Thursday, largely along partisan lines,  to curb the influence of certain “foreign laws” in family court proceedings.

 

HB 351, formally titled “Application of Foreign Law in Certain Cases” but more popularly referred to as THE “Anti-Sharia Bill.”

 

The bill is modeled after legislation proposed by conservative activists who claim Islamic law, which discriminates against women and non-Muslims, is stealthily encroaching upon the American judicial system.

 

 

The measure, sponsored by Rep. Larry Metz, R-Yalaha, is a scaled-down version of one that passed last year in the House but failed in the Senate: it prohibits the application of “any foreign law, legal code, or system” only in family law courts, if that foreign legislation “does not grant the parties affected by the ruling or decision the same fundamental liberties, rights, and privileges guaranteed by the state Constitution or the United States Constitution.”

 

The four Democrats on the House panel fielded a number of criticisms of the proposed legislation: that it is redundant, is motived by anti-Muslim bigotry, would paint Florida in a bad light for foreign investors, and would bog the state down in costly litigation as its constitutionality is challenged.

 

“Any bill that could potentially have consequences on how we as a state are perceived as a place to attract talent from abroad and investment from abroad really is of concern to me and those I represent,” said Rep. José Rodríguez, D-Miami.

 

 

Metz struggled to offer concrete examples of foreign law nefariously affecting Florida’s system of family law when challenged to do so by Rep. Jim Waldman, D-Coconut Creek, though he did offer a hypothetical example of when such a conflict might arise:

 

“Let’s say a couple moves to the United States and they have a prior agreement about the disposition of assets that would occur in the event of a dissolution of marriage, and it’s based on the law of a hypothetical foreign country. … Let’s assume further that that country has a bias toward the male in the relationship; the wife in that situation might object to the application of foreign law.”

 

Waldman replied that Florida law already has mechanisms in place to protect a woman in such a scenario.

 

 

“This bill was triggered by blatant bigotry; that is what this law came out of,” Waldman told the panel, after citing several remarks by ultra-Orthodox Jewish attorney David Yerushalmi, who authored the model “anti-sharia” legislation and who is reported to have made disparaging remarks about African-Americans and Jewish liberals. “It’s offensive, it doesn’t cure any problem that we have, it is solely designed to get at what some people don’t like, and that would be the Muslims. … It’s a waste of our time [and] it’s a waste of our effort.”

 

“The fact of the matter is the bill basically takes our fundamental rights, liberties, and privileges in our federal and state constitutions and turns them into a front and center filter through which foreign law will run if it is going to be applied in a family law proceeding,” Metz countered. “I don’t know how that can be offensive.”

 

The bill passed by a vote of 9-4.