Via Steve Benen’s weekly feature “This Week In God” comes the news that Alabama has a proposed state constitutional amendment what would ban “the application of foreign laws” that might violate the state or federal constitution.

Although they don’t specify what “foreign laws” are the focus, we all know they’re talking about Sharia law.

This isn’t just about prohibiting “the application of foreign laws”; this is about anti-Muslim paranoia. In recent years, the threat of “creeping Sharia law” has been common in right-wing circles – it was even an element of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential platform – and now Alabama voters are being asked to change their state Constitution to enshrine that paranoia into law.

There’s a little problem with this amendment aside from the fact that it’s couched in religious bigotry.  By not going full-tilt anti-Muslim in the text and winking at it by saying “foreign laws,” they open themselves up to some unintended consequences.

Remember Judge Roy Moore?  He’s the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice that got himself some shameless self promotion by insisting on having the Ten Commandments posted in his courtroom.  After that ended badly for him, he planted a stone marker the size of a washing machine on the courthouse lawn with the commandments carved into them.  He was standing up for the law that he claims should be the basis for all the laws in America.  However, legend has it that the Ten Commandments were written down by a Jewish guy who was born and raised in Egypt and spent the rest of his life in the Middle East.  Never made it to the United States and missed participating in the drafting of the United States Constitution by a few thousand years.  So they would fall under the definition of “foreign laws.”

Not only that, the basis of American laws and our legal system including trial by jury and the presumption of innocence come from the English legal tradition.  We’re not talking about the language they are written in (even though they do throw around a lot of Latin); we’re talking about the country of England: home of the Magna Carta, also a foundation of our laws, and the people we fought two wars with to keep them out of America.  Sounds pretty foreign to me.

So if the people of Alabama are bound and determined to excise “foreign law” from their legal system in an effort to keep out Sharia, they’ve got their work cut out for them.