PaulSacramento wrote:Like any Law, there are parts on the Sharia law that are good, quite good, then you have others like:
(p17.3) - The Prophet (Allah Bless him and give him peace) said: "Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him."
Which is practiced in Islamic countries.
Yep, that's a dumb, dangerous, unfair law, but it's not on the books and/or enfored in ALL Islamic countries. Sharia is religious law, and like everything else related to religion, it's interpreted differently by different people and enforced differently in different settings.
Sharia is a complex, nuanced topic regardless of how much some want to oversimplify to fit their own narratives.
PaulSacramento wrote:AND before anyone pulls the OT laws of of their proverbial asses, please show me where, in Christian or Jewish countries the practice is condoned.
Persecution of homosexuals, including detainment and torture, is government policy in Zimbabwe. At this point I expect someone to inform me that Zimbabwe isn't a Christian country and the fact that 85% of the people there identify as Christian is irrelevant, but whatever. There's your example. There are also places where homosexuality is illegal and gay-bashing is overlooked by authorities. That's apparently pretty common in some of the former British Caribbean colonies, such as Jamaica, which also has a large Christian majority.
If you were thinking more of the the predominantly Christian Western democracies then yeah, you're right, homosexual sex between consenting adults is currently legal in all of them. But before you get too cocky, bear in mind that it was a crime in most of them as recently as the late 1960s and there are a few spots where it wasn't decriminalized until the early 1990s. Granted, none of them listed homosexual sex as a capital offense - it just got you jail time, mandatory institutionalization, or chemical castration - but that's still pretty heinous.
To find capital punishment for homosexual activity in the Western democracies we have to go back to the mid to late 1800s. In Canada buggery could be punished by death until 1869, for example. In the US it varied by state, but it was mostly a capital offense until the 1860s. South Carolina kept it on the books until 1873. In the UK it was 1863, if I remember right. Granted, those laws were rarely enforced during the 19th century, but they enforced prior to that and they remained on the books and could have been.
Regarding pulling the OT out of ones ass, that would also have been a capital offense. Also, here's an example of an overtly OT-derived sodomy law from the New Haven colony:
If any man lyeth with mankinde, as a man lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death. Levit. 20. 13. And if any woman change the naturall use into that which is against nature, as Rom. 1. 26. she shall be liable to the same sentence, and punishment, or if any person, or persons, shall commit any other kinde of unnaturall and shame full filthines, called in Scripture the going after strange flesh, or other flesh then God alloweth, by carnal knowledge of another vessel then God in nature hath appointed to become one flesh, whether it be by abusing the contrary part of a grown woman, or child of either sex, or unripe vessel of a girle, wherein the natural use of the woman is left, which God hath ordained for the propagation of posterity, and Sodomiticall filthinesse (tending to the destruction of the race of mankind) is committed by a kind of rape, nature being forced, though the will were inticed,' every such person shall be put to death. Or if any man shall act upon himself; and in the sight of others spill his owne seed, by example, or counsel, or both, corrupting or tempting others to doe the like, which tends to the sin of Sodomy, if it be not one kind of it; or shall defile, or corrupt himself and others, by any kind of sin full filthinesse, he shall be punished according to the nature of the offence; or if the case considered with the aggravating circumstances, shall according to the mind of God revealed in his word require it, he shall be put to death, as the court of magistrates shall determine.
Is it recent? No, not at all. But the fact remains that similar laws with similar justification were on the books in the US, UK, and Canada for hundreds of years, when they were finally repealed in the 1860s they were replaced with harsh non-lethal penalties, government-directed suppression of homosexuals didn't end until the mid to late 20th century, and there was Biblical justification for all of it. So yeah, Christian democracies are more tolerant than some of the most repressive, least tolerant societies currently in existence, and they have been for a while. High praise, indeed.
The part that I find most ironically amusing is that current social conservatives are lambasting Muslims for doing the things that prior generations social conservatives either did or fought like hell to maintain, while simultaneously opposing the goals of the contemporary gay rights movement. The reason that we're better about gay rights than the Muslims is that liberal Christians and gay rights activists fought and bled to get us here while conservatives screamed that treating homosexuals equally would destroy our society, and now this generation of social conservatives is using the fights that their predecessors lost as evidence of Christian superiority over Islam. That's rich.
PaulSacramento wrote:Here in Brampton, we have a large muslim population and there have been quite a few criminal cases that have been prosecuted in which males (fathers and sons) have killed daughters that "disobeyed" them.
https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2010 ... arvez.html
Now, the funny thing is that while the newspapers REFUSED to mention Sharia law, as a person that was THERE IN THE COURT ROOM, I heard it myself, how they did what was right under their Law.
Is there some reason that Sharia law must be specifically mentioned by everyone who reports on honor killings? Anyone who knows anything about honor killings is aware that there are religious underpinnings and that the perpetrators think that their actions are right and proper. The article you linked made those facts perfectly clear, even if it didn't specifically use the word "Sharia."
