Try to get your head around this.
David Nevin, fresh off his victory in getting Geoffrey Fieger acquitted of all charges, has volunteered to donate his considerable legal skills to represent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in his death sentence Show Trial. But KSM doesn’t want the help, he says, because the Constitution permits same sex marriage.
”I will not accept any attorney. I will represent myself,” Mohammed said. “I will not accept anybody, even if he is Muslim, if he swears to the American Constitution.”
Mohammed said he recognized Islamic shariya law and rejected the U.S. Constitution, in part because it allows for "same sexual marriage and many things are very bad.”
It’s true, I suppose, that the Constitution permits same sex marriage–as in, does not prohibit states from performing them. But it in no way affirmatively protects it. Do you think we ought to tell KSM that same sex marriage is only legal on the hippie coasts–and may be overturned in California come November?
On the one hand, if that were to make him feel better about the Constitution (at least the Constitution of the huge number of states that prohibit civil unions and gay marriage), then he might accept Nevin’s legal representation. That might prevent KSM from being killed for plotting the 9/11 plan–or at least give the trial more legitimacy. And, frankly, since KSM seems intent on turning himself into a martyr, there’s something to be said for doing everything we can to prove that this nation is not really all that friendly to gay marriage.
Defiant, confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed went before a military judge on Thursday, refused his U.S. defense counsel and said he would welcome a death sentence.
Mohammed, 43, became the first of a succession of five alleged co-conspirators in the 2001 terror attacks to reject the legitimacy of the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.
”In Allah I put my trust,” the Pakistani intoned in Arabic from a Koran, then personally translated the verse into English for the benefit of the audience.
Judge Ralph Kohlmann, a Marine colonel, asked Mohammed whether he understood that the crimes for which he was accused are punishable by a death sentence.
”This is what I wish — to be martyred,” Mohammed replied in the broken English he learned as an engineering student in his 20s in North Carolina.
On the other hand, it is true that the Constitution does not prohibit gay marriage.
But what if we said to all the homophobes out there that the quickest way to ensure they get to kill KSM is to permit gay men and women to marry nationally? What would they choose if they had to choose between sharia-like legal prohibitions on love–but they’d have to settle for life imprisonment. Or, they could let a lot of people who love each other marry, and in exchange they could have their dead terrorist?
Undoubtedly, they’re not going to have to choose–they’ll get their dead terrorist without having to reflect on the back-handed approval that said terrorist gave to this country’s widespread hatred of gay men and women.
But it all makes you realize, yet again, how this Administration’s eagerness for Show Trials will backfire in so many ways. No one believes that the trial of KSM (who mentioned being torture during his appearance today) has any great legitimacy. But it’s tailor made for KSM to very publicly recruit the next generation of terrorists.