Seth Chalmer challenges the candidate's continued fearmongering over Sharia:
Cain apparently defines "religious purposes" as being inherently different from legal purposes. This conception of religion, however, carries a blatantly Christian (not to mention Protestant) bias. For many religious believers, true religion requires submission to Divine law, and for these groups, establishing a religious community requires establishing local religious courts.
This is certainly true of traditional Judaism, in which Halakhah (Jewish law) regulates every detail of Jewish life — ritual, ethical, economic, civil, and quotidian.
Not a single moment of the traditional Jew's day, no matter how seemingly trivial, is free from countless strictly defined mandates. Since disputes are bound to arise, the rabbinic court (bet din / beis din / beth din; pick your transliteration) has been a central institution for thousands of years. This has held true even in modern America. While the separation of religion and state has required the abandonment of the European model of state-supported rabbinic institutions, rabbinic courts operate on a voluntary basis in all American cities with significant Orthodox Jewish populations, and many Orthodox Jews make use of such courts to settle disputes within the community in accordance with Halakhah. The New York-based Beth Din of America, for example, handles not only ritual and family issues such as conversion, marriage, and divorce, but also civil and economic cases, all in accordance with Torah injunctions.
Nor do these institutions operate with complete independence from the secular legal system. Parties to rabbinic cases can enter into binding arbitration agreements [pdf], mandating compliance with rabbinic decisions by force of secular law. New York and Maryland have both instituted secular laws intended to help Jewish women avoid becoming agunot— a problem which exists only within the framework of Jewish law — "wall of separation" notwithstanding.
And where is Cain's outrage over Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic town whose religion-based government is being constitutionally challenged by other Jews in the community? The Muslims in Murfreesboro simply want to open a mosque, not a municipal government.
The Dish 