Amendment One in Alabama

As Paul Horwitz discusses here, and Michael Helfand does here, a wrongheaded and unnecessary initiative was adopted in Alabama on Tuesday.  Read Paul's and Michael's posts for yourselves, but this, from Paul's, seemed worth highlighting:

There is very little good news about the passage of this amendment. But there are two glimmers of hope. The first is that the measure was loudly and clearly opposed by a variety of faith groups--predominantly black and predominantly white, evangelical and non-evangelical, and politically conservative and liberal. I was hoping that the opposition of the Christian Coalition, for example, would be enough to fracture the reflexively conservative vote in this state and kill the amendment. It was not to be. But it is a positive thing that these groups opposed the amendment. They understood full well that the intended target of the measure was Islamic law, and still opposed it.

In that sense, as I wrote in this paper, this is an important effect of decisions like Larson v. Valente, which erects a bar against sectarian preferences in laws burdening religion, and which was relied on by the Tenth Circuit in striking down the first-generation anti-sharia amendment in Oklahoma. A legislature that cannot aim its laws at a particular sect is faced with the choice to either drop the measure or to apply it to everyone, regardless of which sect they belong to. That creates political coalitions among the faithful, so that, say, the Christian majority is willing and eager to band together with the Muslim minority to oppose the generally applicable law. That's what happened in Alabama. Although it wasn't enough, it was still a pleasure to see.