No, Canon Law And Sharia Law Are Not The Same. One Of Them Wants You Dead.

Monday night, Americans were subjected to a frontal lobotomy as a radical, terror-sympathizing, West-hating Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, drew a false equivalence on “Jessie Watters Primetime” that canon law is the same thing as sharia law.

Last night Abdul El-Sayed sat equated Sharia law with Christian Canon law.

“I don’t begrudge you your right to practice your faith as you choose. I don’t know why the idea that I could practice my faith as I choose is a problem.”

It is a problem.
The story below is Sharia in… https://t.co/A1UgTtrYM7 pic.twitter.com/7FMNjFmvkL

— Trisha Posner (@trishaposner) August 25, 2026

Just relax, people! Let sharia law shine!

Host Jessie Waters didn’t buy it, and neither should you. Because he could not be more obscenely, iniquitously wrong. These two are not the same thing. One is a filing cabinet for a church; the latter could destroy Western civilization.

Canon law is not “Christian law,” no matter how confidently the Blue’s Clues Bolshevik says it. Protestants don’t walk around with a Vatican codebook, and the Eastern Orthodox have their own canons entirely. What El-Sayed inaccurately conflated with sharia law is the Catholic Church’s internal legal system: the 1983 Code of Canon Law, plus a pile of older tradition, that tells the Church how to run itself.

Think of it as the bylaws of a 1.4 billion-member organization that also happens to believe it was founded by God. It tells bishops how to assign priests. It governs sacraments, parish property, religious orders, and whether a Catholic marriage can be annulled inside the Church. Its harshest penalties are laicization, denial of Communion, and excommunication.

Notice what’s missing from that list: Fines. Prison. Stoning.

A bishop in Detroit cannot walk into a Michigan courtroom and demand the state enforce Canon 1398. He cannot jail you for skipping Mass, seize your house for leaving the faith, discount your court testimony as half of a man’s, execute you for converting to Judaism, or shrug while a mob stones you for premarital sex. If he tried any of it, the First Amendment and a civil court would have him in handcuffs by lunch.

The Code itself instructs the Church to defer to civil law on ordinary matters (property, guardianship, adoption, contracts), so long as those laws don’t violate divine law, and in the United States, “divine law” is not supreme law. The Constitution is. The Church can preach at you. It can withhold the Eucharist from you. It cannot become the penal code. That’s why almost nobody outside the Catholic Church has ever heard of canon law: it doesn’t reach past the pews.

But canon law works in harmony with America, because we are, whether the current moronic moment likes admitting it or not, a country built by Christians and Jews whose moral vocabulary stems straight from the Bible. Our Declaration of Independence promised the government would not take away the rights endowed to us by our Creator. Washington called religion and morality the “indispensable supports” of political life. Adams, who is probably looking down in complete horror at us right now, once said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

But here’s what Sharia Sayed misses: The Founders didn’t install a national church. They assumed a national conscience and then built a limited government on top of it, because they believed men were fallen and power needed a leash. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, the First Amendment; these were written by men steeped in scripture and allergic to theocracy.

They had just watched Europe’s centuries of throne-and-altar bloodletting and said: never again, not here, not as public law. Believe whatever you want. Build a church with the strictest internal rules imaginable…just don’t conscript the sheriff, pretty please.

Christianity and Judaism are examples of faiths that live melodiously inside that bargain. A rabbi can’t stone you in Brooklyn. A priest can’t flog you in Detroit. Their authority stops at the congregation door. The state’s law is identical for the believer and the atheist who lives next to him. That’s the deal. And canon law fits inside it. So does halakha, practiced privately. What doesn’t fit is a legal system engineered from the ground up to be the state.

Which brings us to the thing El-Sayed is trying to smuggle in under “freedom of religion”: “sharia” is not “Muslim canon law.” Stop letting him say that.

In private, sharia (religious rules) can look like piety: prayer, no pork, etc. — which the First Amendment covers, but the part he is flattening is sharia as public law: the version currently operating in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Taliban Afghanistan, and embedded in the penal codes of parts of Pakistan and beyond.

There, sharia isn’t a cute little parish pamphlet; it’s the theocratic legal system that applies to Muslim, Christian, atheist, and unlucky layover tourists alike. It’s not “my faith, my choice”; it’s “Allah’s rules, or else.”

And we’re not talking about a strongly worded letter from the diocese.

Under state sharia: apostasy and blasphemy are capital crimes. A woman’s courtroom testimony is worth half a man’s. Daughters inherit less than sons, when they inherit at all. Male guardianship isn’t chivalry; it’s a binding legal chain of command over a woman’s body and movements. Sex outside its narrow permissions is a sin that regularly ends in a death sentence, and in several jurisdictions girls’ privates are cut to make sure they never enjoy any of it.

Canon law’s worst-case outcome is that you’re denied a wafer. Sharia’s worst-case outcome, where it governs, is that you’re denied a courtroom, a passport, or a pulse.

One is a church telling its members how to be Catholic. The other is a government telling an entire population how far to bend the knee, and if they don’t, they’ll cut it off.

If Sharia as state law were just “another religious law, same as any other,” Riyadh and Rome would be interchangeable. They are not.

In Iran, post-1979, the marriage age for girls dropped from 18 to nine almost overnight, women lost the right to initiate divorce and custody, hijab went from optional to compulsory, and Iran remains a world leader in executions, while the worst liberal you know chants in solidarity with the Ayatollah in a crop top. Pakistan, post-1979 Islamization, saw blasphemy prosecutions go from 14 cases in nearly 60 years to over 1,500 in the following three decades. Zina laws have, in practice, turned rape victims into defendants for failing to produce four male witnesses, and the country’s Christian population has been bled to near nothing. Afghanistan, since 2021, is the only country on earth with a formal, standing ban on girls’ secondary and higher education. Where, if you refuse the marriage your family arranged for you, the penalty is stoning.

And this isn’t just a few bad regimes misreading their own religious texts. Pew’s landmark 2013 global survey found 99% of Afghan Muslims and 84% of Pakistani Muslims wanted sharia as official state law. Of those supporters, 79% in Afghanistan and 76% in Pakistan backed the death penalty for apostasy — which nets out to roughly three in four Afghans and two in three Pakistanis endorsing execution for leaving the faith. In Egypt, 74% wanted sharia codified into law, and 86% of that group backed killing converts — about 64% of Egyptian Muslims overall.

So no…these are not “a few bad actors misunderstood by Fox News!” These are states, and in several cases outright majorities, doing precisely what their legal schools prescribe.

So when Trump says he’s going to ban sharia law, that’s a massive win for this country. When El-Sayed says it’s somehow racist and Islamophobic to ban sharia law in this country, he’s telling you exactly how little he cares for you and the country you currently know. And when the man who has previously asked a documentary crew to keep his bookshelf full of Islamic books out of the frame to appear more “secular” on camera falsely equates canon law with sharia law? Let’s just say that it looks eerily similar to taqiyya, the Islamic concept that permits one to lie to advance the religion.

When you’re campaigning alongside grotesque, grisly creeps who say America deserved 9/11, sharing bookshelf space with authors tied to terrorism cases, and surrounding yourself with family members who have close ties to the Taliban and want the American empire to crumble, you don’t get to lecture the rest of us about the sanctity of religious liberty and the American way of life. You don’t get to piggyback off of America’s free-speech protections while quietly pushing a legal system that would strip those same protections from the lady writing this sentence.

I don’t want sharia law anywhere near the American frontier. I’m a woman. I would rather not need a male guardian to sign off on my passport. I would rather not inherit as the discount relative. I would rather not be entered into a courtroom as half a witness. I’d rather not be forced to wear a burqa at the beach, or a hijab at homecoming, or stoned for failing to do so.

Western law, built on a Judeo-Christian claim that every person bears an image no caliph gets to rank, tells a woman she is a full legal person. That is not bigotry against Islam. That’s why I can function in society without being stoned. El-Sayed wants you to hear “sharia law” and picture a prayer rug. I hear a statute book. And I want it banned.