Quaker presidents?

[A.E. Brownstein]

I think there is a real difference between the kind of question that Sandy
proposes and the questions and inferences that Eugene describes. I don't
there is anything constitutionally or politically inappropriate about
asking an Orthodox Jew applying for a position or running for an office
whether they will be available to perform certain tasks on Saturday (see
last November's election campaign). If the candidate answers "No," that
doesn't necessarily mean that they should not get the job. But the question
is reasonable because it comports with what Orthodox Jews under there own
faith to require.

If someone asks a Christian candidate for a job or office, "Are you capable
of rational scientific, or economic, or legal inquiries?" I'm going to sue
them if the person asking the question is an employer or say a lot of
unkind things to the person asking the question if  they have some
non-legal interest in the office. Ditto for the person asking a Jewish
applicant or candidate whether they are capable of kindness and charity
given their commitment to Jewish Scripture.

Alan Brownstein
UC Davis



At 09:58 AM 06/07/2001 -0700, you wrote:

>         Sandy raises an excellent but difficult question, one that is
> connected to the central question of why we prohibit religious
> discrimination.  After all -- and whether or not we "welcome religious
> speech into the public square" -- it might seem quite rational to say
> "Hmm, this fellow believes in X, and this tells me something about his
> likely future behavior."  "This fellow believes in the virgin birth or
> the parting of the Red Sea; I think these are silly and irrational things
> to believe in, so he hasn't properly understood the rules of rational
> scientific inquiry, and therefore will make a bad physicist."  "This
> woman has consciously chosen to reject Jesus's gospel of love, and
> instead sticks with the Old Testament, which is built on hard, unyielding
> justice, so she probably doesn't have the kindness and charity required
> of someone in this job."  "This man is an atheist, and doesn't believe in
> a future state of rewards and punishments, so we shouldn't let him
> testify in court, since he's less likely to obey his oath."  On the
> surface, all of these seem to be credible, rational inferences.  (Of
> course, no-one would think that they are100% reliable, but many of the
> proxies we routinely and permissibly use for future conduct are far from
> 100% reliable.)
>
>         Why do we reject these inferences?  Not, I think, because of
> logic, but because of experience; they may look good on paper to some,
> but they ultimately don't work, for various reasons:  (1)  Denominational
> affiliation, in many (though not all) cases, tells us much less about
> people's views than one might think, partly because people -- especially
> those in large denominations -- often keep their affiliation for cultural
> reasons more than theological, and partly because most scriptures and
> even most denominational traditions are interpreted in different ways by
> different adherents.  (2)  Outsiders often have distorted views of other
> denominations' beliefs, and thus are likely to err in evaluating
> them.  (3)  Religious discrimination, especially by the government, has
> historically proven to create a tremendous amount of social tension,
> often including deadly violence.  Therefore, the benefits of drawing
> inferences based on others' religious views are much less than might at
> first appear (because of the likelihood of error in drawing such
> inferences), and are therefore less than the costs.  Or this, at any
> rate, is the theory of the various bans on religious discrimination.
>
>         So the issue here is whether these reasons apply equally to the
> questioning that Sandy describes (at least in the absence of some
> conclusive argument that the Constitution clearly bans such questioning
> without regard to whether such questioning is wise or not).  Does the
> fact that people use religion only as a first step in deciding to ask
> further questions, and are willing to credit a person's responses to
> those questions ("Yes, I'll be a good President / Secretary of Defense /
> general / soldier, even though I'm nominally a Quaker") diminish our
> concerns?  Does the fact that the questioning relates to high government
> officials diminish them?
>
>         I'm not sure what the right answer is here, but I do think that
> the seeming reasonableness of using stated beliefs as a proxy for likely
> conduct must be viewed in light of the general
> no-religious-discrimination principle, which rests on the notion that
> stated religious beliefs are in fact quite a poor proxy, and a costly one.
>
>         Eugene
>
>Sandy Levinson writes:
>In reading John Rawls' The Law of Peoples, I came across the following (p.
>105):
>
>"The statesman . . . is a central figure in considering the conduct of
>war, and must be prepared to wage a just war in defense of liberal
>democratic regimes....  Quakers, who oppose all wars, can join an
>overlapping consensus on a constitutional regime, but they cannot always
>endorse a democracy's particular decisions--here, to engage in a war of
>self-defnse--even when those decisions are reasonable in the light of its
>political values.  This indicates that they could not in good faith, in
>the absence of special circumstances, seek the highest offices in a
>liberal democratic regime.  The statesman must look to the political
>world, and must, in extreme cases, be able to distinguish between the
>interests of the well-ordered regime he or she serves and the dictates of
>the religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine that he or she personally
>lives by." I assume, at the very least, that this means that any candidate
>identified with Quakerism (say, Richard Nixon) could legitimate be
>interrogated, at news conferences and the like, about the meaning of
>his/her Quakerism and that it would completely legitimate, should that
>compel pacificism, to reject his/her candidacy.  I suppose one could argue
>that one is rejecting the candidacy not because the candidate is a Quaker,
>but, rather, because he/she is a pacifist.  Yet, of course, one might
>never have thought to ask the question had it not been for the knowledge
>that the candidate professed to be a Quaker.  Similarly with regard to a
>Catholic and abortion or, in an every more interesting development, the
>death penalty. I presume there's nothing improper about using religious
>identification as a proxy for the likelihood of holding certain
>substantive views.  Is there anything objectionable in, say, a member of
>the Senate Judiciary Committee beginning a question by saying, "I see that
>you are a member of ____ denomination; tell me, would you find doing X
>consistent with your adherence to the denomination's tenets?"  (I take it
>that John Ashcroft was asked a number of such questions.  Is there
>anything problematic about this?)  Would it be proper to ask a Catholic
>politician who opposes abortion because "God commands that we do not kill
>the innocent" how he square support for capital punishment in light of the
>Vatican's recent unequivocal condemnation of the practice.   (Or one can
>reverse the hypo, as with Mario Cuomo.) I suppose the central question is
>this:  If we indeed welcome relgious speech into the public square, then
>isn't it entailed that we should feel feel to question people, in public,
>about the consequences of their religious commitments without running
>afoul of the "No Test Oath" clause or of the First Amendment? sandy