Welcome Back
This week’s Unbelief Brief spans three very different legal battles with a common thread: how states choose to wield their power. We begin in Pakistan, where a court has effectively sanctioned the marriage of a 13-year-old girl raised as Christian—highlighting a system that fails to protect the vulnerable while zealously enforcing blasphemy laws. From there, we turn to Quebec, where a new secularism law raises both principled defenses of church-state separation and legitimate concerns about overreach. Finally, in Florida, a largely symbolic “Sharia ban” comes paired with provisions that could quietly erode free speech protections. Across contexts, the question remains the same: when does the state protect rights—and when does it compromise them?
Unbelief Brief
Pakistan’s Constitutional Court has upheld the marriage of a Muslim man to a 13-year-old girl, a daughter of Christian parents. Against her father’s protests, the court “ruled that the girl, who had [purportedly] embraced Islam, was of age and therefore under the lawful custody of her husband.”
Forced and coerced conversions to Islam, particularly of children belonging to Christian families, is widespread in Pakistan with little official resistance. Additionally, though child marriage was nominally banned in Pakistan last year, it too has long been tacitly tolerated, particularly in rural areas. This court ruling takes that tacit tolerance a step further to full-blown endorsement. A father now loses custody of his daughter, who, despite her statements to the contrary in court, was likely manipulated into her marriage to an adult Muslim man.
This is a deep sickness at the heart of Pakistani society and its institutions. The country refuses to enforce its own laws in cases of obvious injustice against women, girls, and religious minorities. Only when someone is accused of blasphemy does the state become eager to imprison them or put them on death row. It would be tempting to call this ruling a “new low,” but it’s sadly a predictable development in a country desperate to appease Islamist extremists in every facet of life and society.
Back in North America, Quebec has just passed Bill 9, a law banning daycare workers operating under government subsidies from wearing religious symbols on the job. It will also “phase out public subsidies for religious schools” and prohibit organized prayer in many public institutions such as universities, with some exceptions and stipulations.
As with Bill 21, a widely-encompassing secularism law currently facing scrutiny from Canada’s Supreme Court, Bill 9 contains both excellent and eyebrow-raising provisions. There is of course no reason for governments to be funding explicitly religious schools at all. On the other hand, reasonable people could argue that its sweeping prohibitions on public prayer infringe on the freedom of assembly, even if the ban remains limited to publicly-owned property. In any case, Quebec remains perhaps the most committed to separation of church and state of any government in the Americas right now.
Finally: Florida has just enacted a ban on the application of “foreign and religious laws” within the state’s borders. It is being billed as a ban on “Sharia law” in particular. The implementation of Sharia law in the United States would be constitutionally impossible to begin with, so this seems largely performative.
However, the same law also empowers the state to more freely “designate and defund” entities it deems terrorist organizations. Florida has recently shown a willingness to apply this label without an evidentiary basis. They, along with Texas, designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a terrorist organization last year. Though we may agree with CAIR on very little, they are entitled to the same First Amendment protections as anyone else, absent any conclusive evidence that they have provided material support to terrorist groups. The legislation therefore risks undermining freedom of speech and expression, relying only on the good judgment of state officials—hardly confidence-inspiring when fundamental rights are at stake.
Until next week,
The Team at Ex-Muslims of North America
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