This issue has nothing to do with Islam or the particular nature of Islamic law. Many religions--including Judaism and Roman Catholicism--also have religiously based legal mechanisms for resolving disputes that their adherents consider religious in nature. A rabbinical court may, for example, deny a woman the right to remarry within Orthodox Jewry. That is a woman's choice, if she chooses to bow to such archaic partriarchal dictatorship. But under U.S. law, a civil divorce is all that matters. The Vatican may also deny a divorced Catholic the right to remarry within the church, but that also has nothing to do with civil law. There is no reason why Islamic law should be treated any differently, in England or anywhere else. Secular law must be supreme; if people wish to place additional religious legal restrictions on themselves, that is their choice. The archbishop's bow to mulitculturalism run amuck is, in an odd way, a mirror image of Mike Huckabee's suggestion that the U.S. Constitution should be amended to conform to God's law. By which Huckabee means the God of Christianity, not the God of Islam.

The situation in the United States, I should point out, is different from that in Britain, where the Church of England is still the state-established church (and the monarch "defender of the faith"). Even though the British public (except for Muslims) is much more secular than the American public, it's possible that the Archbishop of Canterbury still hasn't quite gotten the notion of separation of church and state through his head. He did say that as "a pastor of the Church of England," it was appropriate to address the concerns of other religious communities, in this case Muslims. I guess if you still have the Merrie Olde England mindset, you consider yourself an Ur-pastor of everyone within the kingdom. In any case, it is completely inappropriate for the decisions of religious courts to have any secular force in democratic societies.

Williams's statements prompted calls for his resignation from many English bishops and politicians, as well as a number of moderate Muslims. In a statement to his church's governing body on Monday, he said that he was not in favor of issuing "blank checks" enabling Islamic religious courts to erode women's legal rights. That would certainly make me sleep better at night if I were a Muslim woman being charged with adultery in a religious court. The archbishop had, in fact, likened allowing Muslims to take certain issues to their own courts to Orthodox Jews' use of rabbinical courts. Again, the archbishop doesn't get it. As long as adherence to religious law is voluntary--and religious practice does not defy secular law--that's fine. But secular law is the only law of the land that applies to all citizens. Religious courts should never, ever, be allowed to substitute for or overrule secular courts. If a woman in England or America is granted a civil divorce, she is legally divorced--whether her religion recognizes that divorce or not.

The archbishop's position sounds uncomfortably close to that of a German judge who, last year, refused to grant a Muslim woman a civil divorce on grounds of spousal abuse because the husband and wife were Muslims and the judge was under the impression that Islamic law allows wife-beating. (The judge was overruled by a higher and presumably saner German court.) Civil authorities have no business interpreting religious laws and religion, in most instances, has no business trying to flout civil law. (Exceptions occur when civil law manifestly violates human rights--as it did, say, under the Nazis.)

In other instances, the state must step in and overrule religious practices that violate human rights. In the United States, if a Jehovah's Witness or a Christian Scientist parent denies a child a life-saving blood transfusion, the state will step in in the best interest of the child and overrule a religious practice. This is as it should be. If adults wish to die to uphold anti-rational religious beliefs, that is their right. But they have no right to make the same decision for their children. So too, if Muslim immigrant parents try to cut off their daughter's clitoris, the state should step in.

Liberty of conscience is now considered a basic human right (thanks to secular law, Archbishop Williams) but so too is the right of minors not to have their lives sacrificed to parental religious fanaticism. There are of course many areas in which civil law in western societies comes into conflict with certain religious beliefs, such as pacifism. The United States has been fairly ingenious at balancing the two interests. Conscientious objector status, for instance, allows pacifists to engage in military support activities, such as medical services, that involve saving life rather than taking life.

But the state should never recognize the authority of religious courts over any secular legal matters.That the head of the Church of England does not understand this makes me extremely grateful that America's founders risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor (as well as their heads) to establish a government independent of both religious majorities and religious minorities. Thank you, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, John Adams, et al.