Apparently It's Easy to Confuse Trespassing With Sharia Law

Ronald Rotunda of Pajamas Media asks, "What Are D.C. Police Doing Enforcing Sharia Law?"

From the article:

The Islamic Center, housed in a magnificent building in Washington, D.C., has been around for over a half-century, but it is seldom in the news. Unless you drive by (on Embassy Row) you would not know that it there. Because it is supposed to be a peaceful place of worship, we would not expect local police to enter.

Yet last March they did. Three D.C. Metropolitan police officers entered the center, at the direction of an imam, and removed six Muslim women. Their crime? They were worshiping peacefully in the main prayer hall after the imam announced that women were forbidden to enter that area.

What happened in Washington, D.C., should remind us of the peaceful sit-ins of the 1960s. The courts found that the police action removing people from private businesses violated the Equal Protection Clause.

This is all that needs to be read to see that he gets it wrong. The Supreme Court has never held that the Equal Protection Clause bars police from removing people from private businesses at the owner's request, even if the motive involves discrimination. He further references the 1960's sit-in cases, but those are irrelevant here because they were based on grounds other than Equal Protection.

Even Justice Black, who supported invoking the Equal Protection Clause as a means to restrict discrimination on private property, supported exceptions to religious institutions as shown in this excerpt from his dissent in Bell v. Maryland, 378 U.S. 226 (1964):

It is argued that this supposed constitutional right to invade other people's property would not mean that a man's home, his private club, or his church could be forcibly entered or used against his will - only his store or place of business which he has himself "opened to the public" by selling goods or services for money.

As for Rotunda's statement of "Because it is supposed to be a peaceful place of worship, we would not expect local police to enter," what exactly does he mean here?

Does he mean that local police should not enter any place of worship, regardless of what event is taking place or a request of the property owner, to enforce secular law?

The women in this situation were asked by the imam to leave because they were not welcome at that service. By refusing to leave on their own, they chose to commit the act of trespassing. Trespassing is a secular offense which can be enforced by police at the request of the property owner.

All the imam asked of the police here was to enforce local trespassing laws. And they did their job correctly.

Rotunda has played this up as meaning something that it clearly does not.