You do have to wonder what the point of migrating was in the first place if you’re so determined to create a hellhole for yourselves and the people you’ve moved in with. (And please don’t bring up the war in Iraq. I do not support it and in any case Britain is taking in Muslim immigrants by the bucketload as is every other country in the Western world.)

This whole idea comes out of the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. “Those poor Muslim dears we can not really expect them to be able to follow our notions of law now can we. No, they’re just not able to fathom our concepts of civil law. We give them a nice little card-table to eat at while we adults continue to chat amongst ourselves at the grow-ups table.”

You live in a civil society that has secular laws. If those laws impinge on your concept of how things should be run you agitate to have those laws changed. You do not get to shuffle off and set up your own laws separate from the community at large. Democratic pluralism only works when everyone participates and everyone agrees on the ground rules. There are zero Muslim nations that allow Christians to set up there own rules and regulations. A Christian can not openly drink a beer in public in Mecca. A Christian can certainly not get a “no fault divorce” in Egypt no matter how hard they plead.

In the end I predict that the U.K. will have to shut down this experiment or strictly regulate it to the point that it becomes moot. There will be abuses, there will be scandal, there will be stories of women horribly abused or wronged by these courts. There will be cases of child abuse, neglect and eventually deaths that were egregiously mishandled by these courts. Eventually the disconnect between secular rule of law and the idea of religious law will become too great to sustain.

There is a reason why the Christian Church no longer has much say in matters of family law. It is mainly because the state was infinitely more pliable, adaptable and reasonable about how relationships work. It is because the state had a much lower bar about who could marry whom than the church did. It is because the state was also a lot more flexible about how those marriages could be dissolved.

The state only has pragmatic reasons to support marriage: child rearing, property rights, the stability of its citizens. While the state does support marriage, it is not as invested in the institution as a religion will be. It prefers stability over chaos and most time that means it is biased toward the preservation of marriage but only to a point. The state has other considerations to weigh specifically the general welfare of it’s citizens. It understands that sometime a specific marriage is not conducive to the general welfare.

It is that responsibility to the general welfare that informs secular, civic government. In a multicultural society everyone needs to accept that base premise. Ground rules are critical. If Muslims get there own rules, then what about Hindus? Should the UK allow child marriage because it an accepted cultural practice amongst some of its citizens? Should the UK allow the concept of untouchability ? Untouchability has an excellent Hindu and Buddhist pedigree, lots of holy writ to back the idea up. Should the practice of immolating a surviving wife be condoned? Again there is a good religious reason to allow that. Maybe we can allow the pagans to burn criminal miscreants like they did all those years ago in Celtic times. You could sell tickets to a real “Burning Man” celebration; it would be a hoot.

Here is a novel idea; how about you accept that you live in a secular, civil society that has a different set of priorities than you do? How about you accept the proposition that secular civic society of the UK has core values that it has a right to enforce? How about you accept that those ideas are not Islamic? Don’t like it? No one is forcing you to stay in the decadent, corrupt, going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket West. You can alway move to a righteous and pure Islamic country.

What kind of batshit world do you freaks inhabit?

Put away your freedom girls, and get out your hijabs!

However given the ghettoization of some of the UK’s Muslim popuation – which lead directly to 7/7 – the idea of helping to create a completely self-contained world which can live apart from the mainstream UK is surely a worry for Muslims as well as non-Muslims.

I hope that these sorts of tribunals have strong legal oversight and must openly publish their decisions.