Hecate

[Alan Gunn]

At 12:30 PM 12/8/2000 -0500, Michael P Schutt wrote:
>All of these posts confirm that our EC jurisprudence must eventually result
>in a naked public square, to use Fr. Neuhaus' phrase.  The fact is that our
>cultural symbols are often mythical and mystical and religious.  We have
>apparently decided that Western civilization is irrelevant to western
>culture.
>
>Although Jesus was kicked out of the public square long ago, now I suppose
>we should say so long to Los Angeles, St. Paul, and St. Petersburg; and to
>all mythology, to Santa, and to Moses and his offensive tablets, too.  What
>I am gathering from this discussion is that symbols are okay in the public
>square as long as they have no religious relevance to any person. The result
>is a pretty boring culture-- and wait until public performances of Bach,
>Haydn, Handel, and Vaughan Williams are banned.

        While they could mean that, they could also be read as illustrating the
sometimes unfortunate tendency of lawyers to carry the "logic" of
particular rules far beyond what those rules were supposed to achieve. The
Constitution says (roughly) that the federal government can't establish a
religion: does anyone seriously think that using these names and images
establishes a religion in anything remotely resembling what that could
conceivably mean, either as a common-sense reading of the constitutional
text or in the sense in which that phrase was understood when it was
adopted? I think Steve Jamar was quite right in asking, "How does one
incorporate the concept of "chill out" into the area of religious liberty?"
The anwer may be, "by reminding ourselves from time to time what it is that
we're trying to accomplish, rather than by pushing phrases from Supreme
Court opinions to their logical, though absurd, limits."




Alan Gunn
Notre Dame Law School