Separation of Church and State as a State Religion

Sheema Khan, in her column in the Globe and Mail 12 November 2005, laments the de-institutionalization of faith-based arbitration as a condescension from liberal do-gooders refusing to permit Muslims to choose to use this or a civil family court.[1] She phrases her argument as a freedom of religion issue in the same manner as the French ban on the display of religions symbols in state schools in the name of separation of church and state.

The term "Separation of Church and State" has been widely mis-defined in this sense. The French have decided that the principle demands that Muslim girls should not be able to wear the hijab in school (thus limiting the access to state schools for Muslim girls whose faith demands its use). It should be noted that the same law prohibits the visible wearing of the Cross for Christians and of the yarmulke for Jewish men. They have pushed an important enlightenment idea into enforcement of a state atheist "religion".

The dissolution of faith-based arbitration as a tool of the courts was not a similar action. There is no ban on the use of clerical arbitration in any civil dispute. They simply do not, and should not, have the force of law. A person's faith is a matter of his or her own heart. When it acquires the ability of coercion that belongs to the state for the maintenance of order then it becomes a matter of someone else's heart. There is no freedom of religion in that. That is a move away from the secular nature of Western Governance and toward the theocratic nature of a Sharia based society, the goal of the Wahhabi schools of Saudi Arabia who are already the majority funding sources in Islamic Schools in the West.[2]

[1]Sheema Khan's Column in The Globe and Mail 12 November 2005
[2]The Wahhabi Invasion of America