(Minarette.ch)
In what can only be described as mass Islamophobic panic, Switzerland has chosen to ban the construction of minarets, the towers attached to mosques from which the call to prayer is traditionally made. This policy is likely to exacerbate the problem of Islamic extremism rather than mitigate it, by enshrining in Swiss law the status of Muslims' second-class citizens and increasing the appeal of extremists' cultural narrative. You beat terrorism by empowering moderates and marginalizing extremists, not by giving extremists more ammunition.
Calls for similar policies here abound on the far right, despite the fact that such a policy would be a textbook violation of the First Amendment. The results of the Swiss vote generally just reinforce for me the idea that putting people's inalienable rights up to a majority vote makes said rights vulnerable to the bigotries of the moment. The entire point of the Bill of Rights is to prevent that from happening. Yet while banning the construction of minarets is an unlikely outcome here in the United States, we nevertheless put the marriage rights of same-sex couples up to a show of hands over and over again.
This isn't so much "direct democracy" as it is mob rule, which is part of the reason we have a representative democracy in the first place, to avoid government being manipulated by the fleeting impulses of a given moment. These bans by referendum are exactly the kind of thing that James Madison warned about when he referred to decisions being made "not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
-- A. Serwer
