Turkey's new law: 'God's will'

In his recent speech at the funeral of the killed district governor Fatih Safitürk, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan again referred to capital punishment. "It doesn't concern us what George or Hans said. What concerns us is what God has said. After a parliamentary decision [on capital punishment], I as the president would approve it." 

The part on "parliament's approval" is not new. But the part on "what God says" is new. In previous speeches, Erdoğan used to refer to the people's will; now he is referring to God's will. 

According to our honeycombed constitution, the Republic of Turkey is a secular state of law. In other words, religious beliefs and sacred books do not constitute the framework of the law. If legal rules that regulate our daily lives are arranged according to what God says, there cannot be a secular state of law. 

If what God says applies to capital punishment, then why should God's will not apply in other legal fields?  

If the penal code is going to be adapted to God's orders, will civil law and commercial law also stop operating according to the secular order? I guess polygamy and a radical change in the law of inheritance would then follow.  

So at a time when the constitution is the subject of so much debate, we now find ourselves face to face with the dysfunction of the constitutional secular order.  

Defense and denial  

The judge who decided to arrest journalists and administrators of daily Cumhuriyet wrote a separate justification for the arrest of its editor-in-chief, Murat Sabuncu. I bookmarked this story, reported in the papers on Nov. 6. 

As signs of Turkey being transferred to a new legal order are appearing one by one, I keep recalling that...