What Alabama thinks when someone says "sharia"
Good news, people who line their underwear with tinfoil: Sharia law has been dealt a mighty blow in Alabama, where it is now illegal to have sharia law even though the entire Muslim world has had their eye on infiltrating Podunk, Alabama, for
a good long time now.
Alabama Senator Gerald Allen first introduced the idea of explicitly prohibiting sharia laws from the state's courts as a bill in the state legislature. The bill did not pass and instead became a ballot measure that asked whether the courts should answer to any foreign law.
Unlike codified Western law, sharia is a loosely defined set of moral and legal guidelines based on the Koran, the sayings of Prophet Mohammad and Muslim traditions. Its rules and advice cover everything from prayers to personal hygiene.
And Alabama Sen. Gerald Allen will be dead in the cold, cold ground before he listens to somebody else's thoughts on
personal hygiene. More directly, the ballot measure needed to abstract itself out to "any foreign law" in an attempt to dodge the obvious unconstitutionality of barring one and only one set of religious tenets. Whether Alabama is really under any threat whatsoever from sharia or for that matter "any foreign law" is, as you might imagine, a bit sketchy.
A critic, Randy Brinson, president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, called the vote a "tremendous waste of effort," in an interview with Birmingham News last week.
"Sharia law is not going to be implemented in Alabama, it just isn't," Brinson said to Birmingham News.
We can take two approaches here. We can marvel at the people of Alabama passing yet another new law that is meaningless except as an avenue for expressing disgruntled bigotries, or we can nod our heads knowingly and say
Oh, yes. Now you have stopped sharia law from taking over the Alabama government. It was this close, but you managed to defeat the sharia menace at your doorstep.
The latter is tempting, but it would probably just encourage them. Tough call.