-By Warner Todd Huston
Once again proving that liberals are drifting farther every day away from American ideals and principles, an activist judge in Boston recently punished a Christian woman by order that she “learn about Islam” to settle a dispute brought to court by a Muslim tenant from an apartment building the punished woman owns. This couldn’t be a more un-American–and un-Constitutional–punishment.
The case that came to Judge Paul Yee Jr.’s courtroom was between a Christian Pastor who owns an apartment complex in which several Muslim tenants live and one of his Muslim tenants. The complex owner, Daisy Obi, a 73-year-old ordained minister from Nigeria who is the pastor of the Adonai Bible Center in Somerville, Massachusetts, was accused of physically attacking her Muslim tenant and spewing anti-Muslim epithets at her.
The purported victim, tenant Gihan Suliman, claims that Obi called her anti-Muslim names and pushed her down a flight of stairs during an argument in April of 2012.
The case came before Yee, who is a 2009 Deval Patrick appointee to the District Court in Quincy Court One. He was previously an Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County and was also a counsel for the Boston Housing Authority. Clearly Yee thinks of himself as a social warrior and not an adjudicator of law.
At the close of the case in 2014, Judge Yee ruled against Obi and sentenced her to two years in jail and to serve six months and have the rest suspended. But this self-righteous, activist judge also demanded another punishment by forcing Obi to “learn about Islam.”
“I want you to learn about the Muslim faith. I want you to enroll and attend an introductory course on Islam,” Yee said during the sentencing phase of the trial. “You have to give some kind of written documentation to probation that you have in fact done that.”
This is clearly both un-American and un-Constitutional.
This is America. We are supposed to have freedom of thought. You can’t force someone to learn about a religion. You can’t force them to go to any church, synagogue or mosque. You can’t force someone to “like” or “respect” a religion they hate or oppose. These powers do not exist in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, if you are a big fan of that hoary, old “separation of church and state” thing-a-ma-bob, it would seem utterly anathema to the American way of life.
Of course, we have to assume that Judge Yee even had enough proof to rule that this Muslim isn’t a blatant liar.
Certainly the Christian woman being punished has said that she’s never uttered any anti-Muslim comments. She even notes that she has several other Muslim tenants and there have never been any problems with them.
But we weren’t in the courtroom to hear the evidence that might tell us that the Muslim “victim” was giving anything close to a truthful account of the incident where this Christian woman supposedly pushed her down the stairs, So those of us outside the courtroom can’t say one way or the other with anything resembling certainty if the Christian woman is guilty of anything at all.
But with the activist nonsense that came out of Judge Yee at the end of all this, let’s just say I have my doubts that the Muslim “victim” was really the harmed party in this “she said/she said” sort of case.
Regardless, one might think that left-wingers would be upset at this ignorant ruling. But naturally, they are mad only at those who are criticizing the judge. The risible Salon.com, for instance, only had condemnation for Fox News over the ruling.
In the end, this is more proof that the left and its ideological pusher-men like Judge Yee are every day leaving the milieu of American ideals and entering a land of somewhere or something else, something thoroughly un-American.
And not just un-American in an antiseptic way. They are becoming activists against America by forcing people to accept ideas antithetical to America and doing so by force of naked power. In this case this “judge” is forcing a Christian to acquiesce to the evils of Islam. In fact, this judge is clearly no longer interested in American jurisprudence and is instead running a sharia court.
This judge should be impeached, not just censured and his ruling reversed.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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