{"id":20588,"date":"2017-12-12T22:36:22","date_gmt":"2017-12-13T05:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=20588"},"modified":"2017-12-12T22:38:40","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T05:38:40","slug":"rosendale-muffs-easy-radio-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/12\/rosendale-muffs-easy-radio-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosendale muffs easy radio play"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Matt Rosendale in a campaign shot.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cSharia Steve,\u201d the caller said, and I hoped for an epiphany.<\/p>\n

Matt Rosendale, who hopes to abandon his job as state auditor to become a U.S. senator next year, was being interviewed last week on the \u201cVoices of Montana\u201d radio show. The caller was slandering Gov. Steve Bullock, and I was hoping Rosendale might have a John McCain moment<\/a> and set the caller straight.<\/p>\n

\"DC\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

No such luck. Rosendale thanked the caller twice for his comment and never mentioned the slander. With that another spark of hope for a Congress that returns to plain old good manners was extinguished.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t hard to figure where the slander came from. Gov. Bullock vetoed a bill<\/a> in April that would have banned foreign laws in Montana courts. The bill didn\u2019t mention Sharia law, but legislators had neither to wink nor nod to make it clear that\u2019s what they had in mind.<\/p>\n

Bullock had good reason to veto: It would have been a stupid law. That\u2019s the genius behind giving governors and presidents the power to veto. They can force legislatures to take a deep breath before one of their jittery stampedes toward judicial activism makes it into the law books.<\/p>\n

Why stupid? Because the law would have sent a bad message to other countries with no reciprocating benefits. The Center for Security Policy<\/a>\u2019s report on \u201cShariah Law and American State Courts: An Assessment of State Appellate Court Cases,\u201d tries to make an argument that this is \u201ca serious issue and should be a subject of public debate and engagement by policymakers.\u201d But the center struggled to come up with scary-sounding cases.<\/p>\n

Nearly without exception, the cases it found crossed jurisdictional lines and even national boundaries. A typical case would involve a child custody dispute between a couple who had separated and one had moved to the United States. Judges could hardly be expected to resolve such disputes without taking into account the laws in both countries, Sharia or otherwise.<\/p>\n

Some of the cases involved contractual disputes between parties that agreed in advance to settle disagreements using Sharia law.<\/p>\n

\u201cSharia is relevant in a U.S. court either as a foreign law or as a source of information to understand the expectations of the parties in a dispute,\u201d New Jersey lawyer Abed Awad<\/a> said in 2011.<\/p>\n

New Jersey actually was at the center of the most notorious U.S. case<\/a> involving Sharia. In 2010, a family law court judge denied a restraining order to a woman who alleged she was sexually abused by her husband. The husband argued that his Islamic religion gave him the right to demand sex from his wife, even if she was in tears.<\/p>\n

The ruling was overturned on appeal, with no dissent from religious liberty advocates. Religious liberty may trump the wedding cake but not the wedding bed.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>But the lower court ruling was enough to help fuel a nationwide movement to ban Sharia law in state courts. Conduct an online search now, and you are bombed from Snopes to Politifact<\/a> with stories detailing exaggerations and lies about the impact of Sharia law in America.<\/p>\n

Rosendale could have mentioned all of that, but he didn\u2019t bother. I picked up only a few minutes of the broadcast on my way to German class, so I dug it up online<\/a> later to encounter another religion-and-sex-related discussion.<\/p>\n

The topic was Roy Moore, and a caller asked if Rosendale backed the Alabama Republican for the U.S. Senate. Rosendale said he did, despite allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a system in our country that should be honored that says you\u2019re innocent until proven guilty,\u201d Rosendale said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s good news for Bill Clinton, who faces no legal charges for his sexual transgressions. It\u2019s hard to see how it helps Moore, some of whose alleged misconduct may have been illegal but is no longer prosecutable, and much of it was just creepy. Nor does it help President Trump, who laid out the case for his own misconduct as eloquently as any court could.<\/p>\n

But it made a nice detour around the facts for Rosendale, who has hitched his campaign, for better or worse, to the Trump buggy. The man may make a politician after all.<\/p>\n

Outside of those sex allegations, Rosendale said, \u201cJudge Roy Moore has served honorably.\u201d It was an odd thing to say, since Rosendale also has criticized judicial activism. Moore was removed twice<\/a> from the Alabama Supreme Court for ignoring the orders of superior courts. He is the definition of a judicial activist.<\/p>\n

Perhaps consistency is too much to hope for in a politician. I just wish I had a wiser answer to the sexual harassment morass than Rosendale did. But I keep hanging up on this thought: Suppose Thomas Jefferson had been forced to withdraw from public life after allegations surfaced in the second year of his presidency that he had fathered the children of his slave, Sally Hemings.<\/p>\n

I mean, the man wasn\u2019t just a powerful public figure and her immediate supervisor, he legally owned<\/em> her. If anybody had a legal right to demand sex from a woman against her will, he did.<\/p>\n

But if had resigned the presidency and retreated to Monticello, would we better off? Maybe. But I would hate to wager on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSharia Steve,\u201d the caller said, and I hoped for an epiphany. Matt Rosendale, who hopes to abandon his job as state auditor to become a U.S. senator next year, was being interviewed last week on the \u201cVoices of Montana\u201d radio show. The caller was slandering Gov. Steve Bullock, and I was hoping Rosendale might have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":20589,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[1115,2853,553,6549,782],"class_list":["post-20588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-voices-of-montana","tag-donald-trump","tag-matt-rosendale","tag-sharia-law","tag-steve-bullock","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20593,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20588\/revisions\/20593"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}