Newspaper editorial boards, including this one, usually shy away from lengthy comments on state legislative races before they begin. What's more, this page often has little to say about races in districts unless they are close to the readers we serve.

However, the race for the seat in House District 63, which includes the city of Tuscaloosa, promises to have statewide significance if for no other reason than Susan Pace Hamill has announced as a candidate.

Hamill is a law professor at the University of Alabama who holds a degree in theology studies from Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham. She burst on the Alabama scene a few years ago with a series of searing newspaper articles that did what so many Alabama leaders should have done long ago, but didn't.

She took the state's tax code and funding priorities (tax law is one of her specialties) and compared what we were doing to what the Bible actually says we should do about justice, fairness and our responsibilities for "the least of these."

The result was a scathing indictment of the state's taxation and funding system, not so much in her words as in words from the Scriptures.

Hamill, a Democrat, now is running for the state Legislature, and her platform looks deceptively traditional. She says she will work to cut state income taxes, cut sales taxes and repeal the grocery tax. She also promises to work for increased and equitable funding for education.

But as anyone who has studied Alabama's regressive tax system knows, those changes cannot occur without tax reform that shifts the burden of supporting the system over to those who have traditionally profited from it but have not paid for what they have earned.

In other words, the under-taxed affluent will have to contribute more to make up for what was once paid by the overtaxed poor and middle class.

The under-taxed affluent will not like this. And those who represent this segment of the economy, the so-called "big mules," will likely do what they can to defeat her.

It is not often that a campaign holds the possibility of drawing for Alabamians a clear line between those who would, as her Web page says, apply "Christian principles to public policy," and those who will seek to justify the system as it currently exists and discredit those who want to change it.

A morality play is shaping up in the legislative race for District 63. How the characters act their parts and how the audience, in this case the voters, responds, will say much about the future of tax reform in Alabama.

It will also tell us a lot about ourselves.