Last night I sat down to write a diary about how religion is affecting our political process. I wanted to address questions such: how do we convince people that humanism provides a moral framework? How do we reconcile that Constitution was born out of The Enlightenment and yet conservatives want to cast it as a deriving from religious texts? And most important in the current context. How do Supreme Court justices reconcile religious beliefs with the Rule of Law? Which has higher standing? I believe in spirituality in the public space and yet rule by religion scares me. But I had a hard time putting words to paper.
Luckily I woke up this morning to this article in the Chicago Tribune:
Carter: Policy by religion has nation at risk
Our most truly religious president has written a book about religion in public and in politics called ""Our Endangered Values". I cannot wait to read it. Below are a few more of my own thoughts about religion and policy and is Scalito an acceptable Supreme Court nominee.
It seems that liberals are often attacked for being too secular (voting tendencies and church attendance correlate very highly). Christian Conservatives often act like liberals are attacking them. But this is a ploy, we attack because we are on the defense. When cases are brought against religion in public life, it is generally because we are defending the establishment clause, not attacking Christians. We need to change the way this conversation is had.
Yet we also need to understand why religious conservatives of all types want to bring religion into the public square. I think there is a belief that values can only be derived through religion and therefore without religion in the public square we will not have morals and values. We must start to articulate the humanism does supply a framework for morality and this can be completely consistent with religious morality and yet have the issues that religious morality poses as I will discuss below (ie. law trumps religion).
How did we get to this point? Actually it is the big business conservatives that broke liberalism and removed the components of virtue, not the 60s (which while promoting lots of freedom, believed in the ideal of loving each other, this is a form of virtue). Rockfeller was the first that said that private life did not have to sync with virtue in business. By removing virtue from as necessary from capitalism, he removed it from our basic life. Because of this religious conservatives feel the need to re-impose religion in non-economic situations. It is annoying that it is really religious conservatives and big business that are at odds and liberals get caught in the middle.
But here is the problem. Our Constitution is based on Liberal concepts. The compromise of western liberal democracy is that religion subjugated to the law. Look at Holland, they are having this argument much more explicitly than us. 60 Minutes had a piece on the Theo Van Gogh murder, and the had moderate Muslim on the show. At a certain point, he says [paraphrasing], "Just because this is a liberal democracy does not give people the right to denigrate my religion and insult us". The interviewer is slightly shocked and does not quite know how to respond as he realizes, that yes it does mean that. People like O'Reilly want to imply that there is some religious context to our law that the Forefathers implied, but did not state. This is not true and in fact goes to the heart of trying to destroy our democracy.
So what does this mean for policy? We must encourage virtue where we can. For example if people want to vote that public universities should not have co-ed dorms, let them do so. Policies that promote family should be pushed, such as healthcare and family leave. But we also cannot give in. It is important that we ask justices (all justices, not just catholic) when law and religion conflict what would you do?