The Contradiction of White Woke Libtard Support for Sharia Law
A Rasmussen and Our Republic survey of 1,026 likely voters, taken on 20 September 2026, found that 21 percent of voters overall have a mostly or somewhat positive view of sharia, against 57 percent negative. Among voters aged 18 to 24 the positive share is 43 percent. Among those aged 25 to 29 it is 39 percent. That is the "four in ten." A second question is harder. Asked whether a town, city or state should be allowed to impose sharia if a majority of residents wanted it, 83 percent of voters said no. About a quarter of those aged 18 to 35 said yes, and Rasmussen puts support among voters under 30 at 27 percent, against 2 percent of those 40 and older. A further slice of the young, 24 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds and 31 percent of 25-to-29-year-olds, would require public schools to teach the benefits of sharia. The poll's sponsor reads this as sympathy for a group coded as marginalised, not as a generation of committed Islamists. The Federalist piece follows that reading.
The majority-rule question is the one that exposes the ethic. Western liberal law is not a licence for a local majority to pick a different legal code. It is a set of limits on what any majority may do. Equal protection, speech, conscience, and a single civil standard are the point of the arrangement. A politics that treats those limits as obstacles, removable wherever a neighbourhood votes to remove them, has already left liberalism. It has kept the language of democracy and dropped the part that made democracy compatible with rights.
Classical sharia is not a vague call for modest dress. In the schools that still matter to Islamist movements it is a comprehensive law: unequal inheritance and testimony for women, hudud punishments, apostasy and blasphemy rules, and criminalisation of same-sex sex. Countries that apply it in full do not host pride marches or treat a woman's vote as equal to her brother's. One can note that most Muslims in the West do not want that code enacted, and that "sharia" in a poll may mean something as soft as halal food and a mosque. The respondents who said a community should be allowed to adopt it as its legal code were not answering a question about dietary accommodation. They were answering a question about replacing the law.
That is the contradiction, and it sits hardest on the young progressive. The same cohort ranks women's autonomy and gay rights among its non-negotiables, then offers a sympathetic view of a system whose classical texts negate both, provided the system can be filed under the oppressed. Justin Haskins, whose group commissioned the poll, describes the mechanism plainly: Muslims are perceived as marginalised, so policies associated with Islam are treated sympathetically without scrutiny of what those policies teach. What the poll shows is an age break large enough to matter, and a partisan pattern its sponsors summarise as young voters and Democrats. The framework that produces it is taught most intensively in the institutions those voters attend.
The escape hatch is that they do not mean it. Ignorance is probably most of the result. A positive "opinion of sharia" is cheap when the word has never been set next to a penal code. Support for a local majority imposing it is less cheap, and 27 percent of under-30s gave it. Even if half of them would reverse the answer after a briefing on inheritance and apostasy, the prior is the interesting fact. The prior is that a majority preference inside a community outranks the rights of the women and gay people inside that community, so long as the preference belongs to the approved side. That is not a multicultural exception. It is the rule they have actually learned: rights are real against their parents' institutions, and optional against anyone their teachers have marked as a victim. A liberalism that cannot say no to this cannot say what it is for.
https://gellerreport.com/2026/10/shock-poll-4-in-10-young-americans-support-sharia-law.html/
