If you find yourself taken in by the latest wave of jingoist fearmongering.....

Such as the intellectually devoid screeds of Frank Gaffney and Pamela Gellar, check out Ed Brayton's dissection of Gaffney's comedic study titled "Shari'a in American Courts"....you know...the impetus behind  these ridiculous and self defeating 'anti-Sharia laws'.

Recently the Center for Security Policy, led by the absolutely deranged Frank Gaffney, put out a "study" called Shariah in American Courts that pinpoints 50 rulings from the courts in 23 states that supposedly prove Gaffney's moronic "creeping Sharia" position. I've finally gotten around to reading that report.

Let me make this as clear as I possibly can: This report is not merely badly researched and badly prepared, it is an outright fraud. No one who actually reads the rulings could reach anything but the opposite conclusion from the one they intend to foster. Nearly every single case they offer argues against their conclusion. Now let me prove that assertion.

[read the individual examinations here]

The punchline to all of this is that each and every one of those first four examples was rated as "highly relevant" to the conclusion of the report. In fact, I think all of them are rated that way. And as you go down the list, you find the same exact thing again and again. The 5th case, and 2nd case from California, involves a woman demanding child support and alimony based on an alleged Islamic "Muta" marriage that was performed only by she and a man in their own apartment with no one else present and no marriage license. The court ruled that this was not a legal marriage at all -- again, the exact opposite of what is implied. And it just goes on and on like this, each ruling not only not involving the imposition of Sharia law, but most of them involving the explicit rejection of Sharia law.

Here's how the CSP sells this report before you read it:

These cases are the stories of Muslim American families, mostly Muslim women and children, who were asking American courts to preserve their rights to equal protection and due process. These families came to America for freedom from the discriminatory and cruel laws of Shariah. When our courts then apply Shariah law in the lives of these families, and deny them equal protection, they are betraying the principles on which America was founded.

The study's findings suggest that Shariah law has entered into state court decisions, in conflict with the Constitution and state public policy. Some commentators have said there are no more than one or two cases of Shariah law in U.S. state court cases; yet we found 50 significant cases just from the small sample of appellate published cases.

Which might be relevant if most of those cases didn't show the exact opposite of what you're claiming here. This report is not just bad. It's not just inaccurate. It's an outright fraud.