Second-class citizenship for those with deeply religious moral systems -- oops

[Howard Schweber]

I inadvertently omitted the part that identified the post to which I was 
responding as coming from Sean Wilson.

hs


>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