Second-class citizenship for those with deeply religious moral systems

[Howard Schweber]

At 11:17 AM 11/27/2006 -0800, you wrote:
>... the thing that I have not understood about this viewpoint is the claim 
>that passions about world view should not be cultivated by the political 
>system merely because they are packaged into a "God argument." There is 
>nothing in constitutional theory(or the history of it) which supports 
>this. To the contrary, the whole idea of American constitutionalism is 
>that these and other fixations that cause humans to rule one another are 
>given an explicit license to compete in the democratic ritual. It is other 
>portions of constitutionalism -- checks and balances, separation of 
>powers, the codification of fundamental liberty -- which are supposed to 
>act against the urge to unfairly oppress another based upon a God argument.


None of those things are meaningful unless they are based on a prior 
commitment to the proposition that they trump the "God argument" in cases 
of conflict.  But (western) religions teach that they take precedence over 
mere political commitments because God is greater than any human mind or 
will.  If a president gets up and says "God wants me to have absolute 
control over our nation in order to further His work, and I call on all 
Christians to support God's will and on Christians in Congress to ensure 
that their colleagues do not attempt to use the Constitution to interfere 
with my execution of that will" then either he has done something improper 
and is unfit for office, or the American experiment is over.


>  In other words, it is one thing to say that Courts should not offer a 
> policy position based upon a religious a priori, but it is another 
> altogether to say that when a Congress person possessing such views 
> successfully survives the democratic ritual -- that he or she "should not 
> be in the Congress" or "is violating constitutionalism."


No one said any such thing.  Please re-read the previous posts.  But how 
can you take the simultaneous positions that it is consistent with our 
constitution for a legislature to adopt a law based solely on a religious a 
priori but not for a reviewing court to adopt the same a priori preferences 
in reviewing that law?  Is this an extreme form of judicial supremacy -- 
call it "judicial exclusivity" -- in which legislators (and the executive?) 
have no obligation to act constitutionally in their  work?


>I wonder to what extent this is an argument against a style rather than a 
>substance. "God says do this," versus "my values say do this, and I must 
>vote my principle." Is this in the end not an argument  against merely the 
>STYLE of the assertion? (That Style A is now out of fashion?)

"Merely the style"??  I think language matters quite a lot, actually, and 
that a critical consideration of the construction of language is 
inseparable from serious thinking about, inter alia, the requirements of 
constitutionalism.  On the larger question of the relation between moral 
preference and religious moral preference, please see my previous post in 
response to Eugene's comments.

Howard Schweber
Dept. of Political Science
UW-Madison