In his update on the 2017 Legislative Session Representative Dan Flynn calls HB 45 (regarding American law in American courts) his number one priority. He goes on to elaborate that in June 2015 the Texas Attorney General issued an opinion (KP-0094) at Flynn’s request stating that “Texas law already prohibits violations of constitutional rights and public policy when foreign law is applied.” Flynn added that he provided the AG with 19 scenarios that cover the family law landscape and that the AG opined that “Texas law already prohibits such violations.” Flynn went on to add that “no changes in the substantive law are needed.” But it was his number one priority and he passed it.
There is, of course, another way to say this: “I used the resources of the State of Texas including the Attorney General, Legislative Council, multiple committees in both the House and the Senate and time on the floor of both bodies to pass completely unnecessary and unneeded legislation. I didn’t do this because I thought Sharia Law was coming to East Texas—clearly it was not, is not and could not. I took this action so I could tell my constituents that I was stopping it.”
First, it’s hard to believe that a rural representative thinks fighting a fiction is a higher priority than funding public education, cutting property taxes, helping retired teachers, expanding broadband, fixing CPS, fixing Juvenile Justice or straightening out HHS.
More importantly, irresponsible rhetoric gives potential bad actors permission to act badly. I was about five mile from the 16th Street Baptist Church when it was bombed in 1963 and I remember what the Governor and Police Commissioner said about segregation. They didn’t plant the bomb but if their rhetoric didn’t light the fuse it sure as hell didn’t snuff it out. Scapegoating Islam doesn’t foster good neighbors and over 70 Mosques were attacked in 2015 alone.
Also worth noting: Pandering to biases give politicians permission to do dumb things like spending 800 million dollars a cycle on the federal responsibility of border protection or turning down 100 billion of our tax dollars over ten years and refusing 300 to 400 billion dollars worth of economic activity by failing to expand Medicaid under the ACA. And doing this while saying we can’t afford to meet our basic obligations to Texans.
So I would offer this advice to future legislators who have as a top priority stopping something that’s never going to happen: Forget Sharia Law and instead take on some real challenges like zombies, chupacabras and yetis (the snowmen not the coolers). The effort will likely burn fewer state resources, be equally effective and maybe nobody will get hurt.
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