Mr. Hitchens needs to make a clear distinction between voluntary institutions, such as a Beth Din, and ones that can use the power of the state to compel obedience. There are Beth Din's in plenty of places where they have no statutory authority. They can have many uses, but depend on the parties voluntarily accepting their authority, and while there can be serious consequences for disobedience they are of the 'voluntary' sort - your friends will not speak to you.

There are lots of similar kinds of institutions in most western countries - faculty senates, arbitration boards, neighborhood associations. The fact that people generally abide by these decisions even when they go against them is a sign that it matters to belong. If Sharia courts exist in that sense it would be no threat.

As Mr. Hitchens correctly points out, it is having a different law for different communities that would be a giant step backward. Can we imagine a British Court enforcing a dowry agreement?

But that is not what most of these private courts do. They keep people out of the law courts by enforcing rules for members and membership. Very different from the archbishop's foolishness.

Absurd that any purported spiritual leader would condemn an entire segment of the population to potential human rights abuses. To my understanding the English did away with religious courts or the ability of religious courts to try people a long time ago. I realize that this applied to priests/clerics. Still the dual system was disallowed. Why now fracture the legal system at the risk of innocent people? England played a tremendous role in the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. It allowed for a Bill of Rights that served as a model for that of the United States. Britain ended slavery before the United States did; Britain enacted progressive labor legislation before other countries did. The point is that This pronouncement by the Archbishop sets England back not just one or two steps but back to a time before the Reform Acts of the 19th century, before Locke, Bentham, Mill, , Owen etc. What on earth could have led to this kind of mindless pronouncement by the Archbishop of Canterbury?

I think you have the issue exactly right. It is one thing to allow individuals to agree to an alternative judicial system where it enforces the same principals and laws of our society. For example, parties to a dispute may agree to have an arbitrator resolve their dispute instead of a court, but the arbitrator will still apply our society's laws and principals to resolve that dispute.

It is something else, however, to allow people to agree to a system that would enforce rules opposed to the principals and laws of our society. For example, a religious court determining that a husband properly beat his wife.

Although consenting adults should be given broad discretion in what they can agree to do, agreements that contravene (or lead to the contravention of) our society's laws and principals should not be enforced. (and generally are not)

Further, there would be too many problems in determining whether consent to a religious court was truly "voluntary." We already have far to many examples of closed religous communities using their cloistered and secretive nature to abuse followers.

In short, there is simply too much mischief that would be permissible if our society allowed religious courts to issue binding and final decisions.

The archbishop is an ignorant fool, but he does represent a small but highly verbose minority (mostly feeding off the public trough in pseudo-academic disciplines). The sad part is that various form of multicultural confusion may already be so advanced in Western culture that no liberal response will stand a chance and we will all end up fighting each other in ways much worse than any "discrimination" that exists today. I wonder if we will then find time to blame idiots like the archbishop for the demise of the enlightenment ideal?