Tying a couple stories together...

From WSJ.com: OpinionJournal - Cross Country -

"Troubling incidents began several years ago, when taxi drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport--about three-quarters of whom are Muslim--started refusing to transport passengers carrying alcohol. One woman, returning from France with wine, was turned away by five cabs in succession. Refusals of service now number about 100 a month, and heated altercations have erupted."

[...]

Hassan Mohamud, one of the fatwa signers, praised the two top-light proposal as a national model for accommodating Islam in areas ranging from housing to the workplace. But according to Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, MAS is "trying to hijack and radicalize the Somali community for their Middle East agenda."

Ahmed Samatar, a recognized expert on Somali society at Macalester College in St. Paul notes that "There is a general Islamic prohibition against drinking, but carrying alcohol for people in commercial enterprise has never been forbidden." Similarly, Islam prohibits consuming pork, but not touching or scanning it, according to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the American Society for Muslim Advancement in New York. It is, or should be, "a nonissue."

So what happens when these "nonissues" become actual issues? Let's take a look:

[In Germany last week, a judge citing the verse caused a public outcry after she rejected the request for a fast track divorce by a Moroccan-German woman because her husband beat her. The judge, removed from the case, had written that the Koran sanctioned physical abuse.]

The Koran sanctioned physical abuse...therefore the law of the land doesn't apply, right? The rest of the Times article this comes from deals with the struggles of a woman to translate the Koran into English and soften the tone of a particular passage that appears to sanction "beatings" as a way to control the behavior of a man's wife. Beyond the fact that she's trying to reinterpret the passage in order to water it down, I'm a bit frustrated by the whole notion that these passages are still so closely followed that there is a need to reinterpret them in order to protect women.