I'd like to continue with McCarthy's article today. He states that:
You are not supposed to connect the dots and ask, “Well, how is it conceivable that any sharia-adherent alien could faithfully pledge allegiance to our Constitution?” .... Sharia is not religion. Sharia is a totalitarian societal structure and legal corpus that anti-American radicals seek to impose. Yes, their motivation for doing so is their interpretation of their religion — the fundamentalist, literalist construction of Islam. But that does not make sharia itself a matter of “religion” in the Western sense, even if vast numbers of Arab Muslims — for whom there is no cognizable separation of mosque and state — say otherwise.By an almost logical necessity Sharia adherents must wish to ultimately establish a theocracy in which everything is subordinated to the principles of Islam. This is certainly not freedom of religion or of speech but quite the opposite. Nor can a sharia adherent agree to the principle that all persons are equal under the law nor that women are in all relevant respects equal to men. Quite simply, a sharia-inclined theocrat cannot consistently support the freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution.
McCarthy writes:
Two things flow from this. The first involves immigration. As we’ve previously demonstrated, there is no constitutional prohibition against considering religion in deciding which aliens to allow into the United States — immigration is a privilege, not a right; and our Constitution is security for Americans, not a weapon for aliens to use against Americans. Nevertheless, even if there were a constitutional bar against “religious tests,” sharia is not religion. There are no constitutional constraints against excluding aliens on grounds of anti-American political ideology. Excluding anti-Americans from America is common sense and was regarded as such for much of our history.It's the repeatedly asserted goal of radical Muslims to use democracy as a means to enable them to gradually acquire political power so that politicians, out of concern for their political viability, will pass laws that impose sharia.
In a time of radical Islamic threat to our national security, Donald Trump is right to propose that aliens from sharia-supremacist areas be carefully vetted for adherence to anti-constitutional principles. Leftists — those notorious disciples of the Framers — claim this is unconstitutional. When shown it is not, they claim that it is against our “tradition” — being, you know, big fans of American tradition. When shown that this is not the case either, when shown that our history supports ideological exclusion of anti-Americans, leftists are down to claiming, “It is not who we are” — by which they always mean it is not who they are, and who they would force the rest of us to be.
It's not hard to imagine how this could be achieved. When the population of Muslims gets large enough they'll be seen as a voting block that needs to be appeased and catered to just like other such groups. To keep them loyal to the party in which they form a formidable part of the base their demands will be acquiesced to whenever that party is in power. At first these demands might seem minor, like freeing their schools from certain regulations, or allowing Muslim communities a measure of legal semi-autonomy so that they can impose sharia on their own people.
Eventually, as Muslim mayors and councilmen are elected to office sharia will be imposed city-wide, by fiat or ordinance, and a nation, which has for the last eight years looked the other way as its laws and Constitution were flouted time and again by its president and candidates for president, will have a hard time invoking the Constitution as a restraint on the inexorable imposition of sharia. Indeed, something like this transformational process is already well along in Europe.
McCarthy packs much more into his column. He explains, for example, how the left came to endorse the position that we should allow radicals to freely immigrate into the U.S. It's as interesting as it is important.