Archbishop and Sharia law

I keep highlighting areas where news reporting seems to be giving a different story in the headlines to what the details seem to tell. Well it seems to me that this is another. This is a fairly accurate reportage of what the ABC said. Taken from this reportArchbishop ignites Sharia law row - Home News, UK - Independent.co.uk: "'We already have in this country a number of situations in which the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances. ... There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law as we already do with aspects of other kinds of religious law. It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever license a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general. But there are ways of looking at marital disputes, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them. In some cultural and religious settings they would seem more appropriate.'"
In other words he was not proposing or defending sharia law, merely saying that, in line with other 'conscience' clauses recognised in British law, some provisions might be accommodated where they don't conflict with existing legal principles or human rights. He was most certainly not defending amputations, the legal half-value of women as witnesses or stonings for adultery or blasphemy. However, to read the headlines you'd think that he had defended and proposed those things.

Shame on the Christians (eg the first few comments on this post) who weighed in on the side of secular headlinists without honouring a brother in Christ with a proper hearing first.
Sheesh.

PS I think my position is vindicated by what is said in this article. And if you want a view of why some people of a Muslim background are wary read Yasmin Alibhai Brown's article (but note that here emotionally understandable engagement with the issue means that she attributes to Rowan what he is careful not to say). And I think Deborah Orr is spot on when she says; "if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment". I think it's safe to say that hardly a soul is heeding his warning. Crude oppositions and mythologies are exactly what people are rushing headlong to display. ... robust as all of these rebuttals are, the fact is that none of them really contradicts what Williams was actually attempting to say. ... far from the setting up of sharia courts that Williams has been painted as advocating, ... Williams is more concerned about other, more challenging elisions of religious and cultural belief in British Muslim communities. He is worried that "recognition of 'supplementary jurisdiction' in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women"
PPS Faith and Theology also has a nice comment in this post. Particularly apposite, and reflecting one of my own unpublished thoughts, was this: "the Archbishop’s biggest problem is simply that he’s so much smarter than anyone else in the Church, and of course infinitely smarter than the poor news media, who haven’t the faintest idea what he’s actually talking about. The result is a public spectacle of stunning, breathtaking misunderstanding. (Today, some outraged nincompoop in the English Church was even calling for Williams’ resignation...)" And illustrating my point about editors writing or outlining stories before they know the facts: "Kim Fabricius going head-to-head on BBC radio with Peter Hitchens (editor of the Sunday Mail) – the best moment is where Kim forces Hitchens to confess that he hasn’t even read the lecture for himself!"