A Florida Senate panel’s hurried decision last week to pass a measure banning the use of Sharia law may, in practice, serve to prevent Orthodox Jewish couples from using Jewish religious courts to arbitrate their divorces.

The bill, the Application of Foreign Law in Certain Cases, is likely to pass the Florida Senate and, according to The Jewish Daily Foward’s Paul Berger, Florida Governor Rick Scott is expected to sign the bill into law.

The language of the bill is largely modeled after a wave of legislation targeting Sharia, traditional Islamic law, that has swept the country in recent years as part of an organized Islamophobia campaign, detailed in the Center for American Progress’s report Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network In America. But the Florida bill — styled on model legislation drafted by David Yerushalmi, an Orthodox Jew who lives in New York — may have the unintended consequence of severely limiting the ability of Orthodox Jews to employ arbitration from Jewish religious courts in divorces.

The Florida bill states that arbitration is unenforceable if a tribunal bases its ruling on a “foreign law, legal code or system” that does not give people the same rights as Florida or U.S. Constitutions. Speaking to The Forward, Anti-Defamation League attorney David Barkey warns that the bill will affect Jews seeking divorces in accordance with rabbinical courts.

Barkey explains that because only a man can grant his wife a Jewish divorce, rabbinical courts could be seen as violating state and federal equal protection principles. “Any abritration or ruling based on such a law is, per se, invalid,” said Barkey. Orthodox couples frequently arbitrate divorces in accordance with rabbincal courts and, after agreeing to the terms of their divorce, petition a civil court to make the ruling a binding judgement.

Islamic and Jewish groups, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, challenge that the bill targets Islam, but the bill’s sponsors insist that’s not true. Both the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America have vowed to fight the bill.

“The notion that secular judges are being asked to decide whether religious law does or does not conform with ‘fundamental liberties’ is an intrusion on religious freedom and could be a dangerous precedent for more far-ranging efforts in the future that might well impact our community,” warned Agudath’s vice president, Rabbi David Zwiebel.

The American Jewish Committee’s general counsel, Marc Stern, slammed the bill as “all smoke and mirrors” in an interview with The Forward. “It’s a trap for the unwary and nothing more. But I know it will be seen as another great victory in suppressing extremist Islam,” said Stern. “It’s nothing of the sort.”

Today on Capitol Hill, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta pushed back against two GOP hawks who are pushing for U.S. military intervention in Syria, laying out the considerations that have informed U.S. caution in getting militarily involved.

Faced with aggressive questioning, Panetta warned Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John McCain (R-AZ) — both of whom called this week for bombing Syria — that such options need to be weighed carefully and that grueling diplomatic work needs to be put in to actualize such policies. That work is being done, he said, by the U.S., even as it exhibits caution regarding military options to help resolve the nearly year-old Syrian uprising that has claimed more than 7,000 lives.

Lieberman suggested at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today that the U.S. needs to “get the international community together in a coalition of the willing soon.” Panetta responded sternly, seeming to lecture Lieberman and McCain that deciding on military action is no easy choice:

PANETTA: If the agreement here is that we ought not to just go in unilaterally, then we have to build a multilateral coalition. We’ve got to be able to work at that. It’s not that easy to deal with some of the concerns that are out there. But nevertheless we are working at it. Secretary Clinton is working at it everyday. There are diplomats that are engaged on this issue.…

Can it happen today? Can it happen now? No. It’s gonna take some work; it’s going to take some time. But when we do it, we’ll do it right. We will not do it in a way that will make the situation worse. That’s what we have to be careful of.

Watch a video of the exchange:

Earlier in the hearing, McCain baited Panetta by repeatedly asking him questions along the lines of: “How many more have to die, 10,000 more, 20,000 more? How many more?” Panetta responded:

PANETTA: As secretary of Defense, before I recommend that we put our sons and daughters in uniform in harms way, I’ve got to make very sure that we know what the mission is. I’ve got to — I’ve got to make very sure that we know whether we can achieve that mission? At what price? And whether or not it will make matters better, or worse?

Those are the considerations that I have to engage in.

Like with Iran — as President Obama noted yesterday — those arguing for military force in Syria rarely seem to engage in these considerations at all.