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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (989)	9/11/1999 11:50:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6418

I'm many, many posts behind. But anyway... here's what you're missing, imo: In diverse, complex, multi-cultural, multi-religious, largely secularized societies, the justifications given when changes in the law are contemplated have to meet certain standards. "Values" means nothing more than the precepts that somebody likes best. But when it comes to making law, or changing law, or abridging law, under modern, democratic traditions, it is reasonable to unpack the term "values" for its content. Of course, sometimes religiously-derived prohibitions and injunctions coincide with what are called "moral" injunctions and prohibitions. They overlap. (It is interesting that it is those religious prohibitions and injunctions that coincide with standard, modern secular practice which survive in written law. Somehow, you may have noticed, parents stoning their children to death for insubordination outside the gates of the city, has fallen away as a tort in modern societies. So has providing birth control. Even Jews and Seventh Day Adventists used to be forced to close their businesses on the Christian Sabbath. Even atheist children, yours truly included, used to be forced to bow their heads and say aloud a prayer to the deity of the Christians.) If the content of the law embodies, centrally, an item of dogma simply extracted from a "revealed" religious code (even if it is dressed up with the secular word "values")-- such, for example, as that a fertilized oocite is a human person and all female humans should be forced by the state against their wills not to have it removed from their uteruses-- it is not going to fly, and shouldn't fly. Because in the complex cultural and political situation in which we live, other competing and contradictory "revealed" precepts may conflict with it. And by forcing these issues into the legislative domain, the first steps toward a solution by force are being taken. For example, making certain children uncomfortable in school by mandated prayer there; employers telling employees they have to pray at work; women being forced to conform their reproductive practices to pre-scientific notions embodied in hallowed texts; driving the medical study of abortion out of the curriculum in medical schools. God sent free thought to save us from the consequences of the fifty-seven varieties of religious belief being applied in the political arena.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (989)	9/11/1999 11:51:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

P.S. Let's say the religious guys get a majority together to elect legislators pledged to enact a law secretly based on their religious convictions/beliefs... The law is passed... A minority (nonbelievers or other-believers) smells a rat. They challenge the law through the appellate system... The justifications for the new law must be squared with the Constitution, ie, reasons must be given... Unless the appellate process itself has been usurped and seized by judges desiring to legislate religious beliefs for their own sake, the unpacking of the proposed statute will reveal its particularist origin, and it will be dismissed, as has happened hundreds, or thousands, of times in American jurisprudence. I read in the paper recently about a judge in Tennessee who has insisted on displaying a giant replica of the Decalog in the courtroom because he believes God wants him to. The appellate courts have quite properly dismissed this argument. Even though the religious consensus in Tennessee supports what he's doing, in the end, he probably won't get away with it. The Supreme Court will not permit it. But... such usurpation may be, I acknowledge, the shape of the future. It is certainly what is feared by all advocates of the firm separation of church and state. If it does come, Christopher, you won't like it, and neither will Neocon, as it dawns on you the extent of what has become thinkable. It is already beginning to happen, with the "right to life" litmus test for judicial appointments.