Read it and be enlightened. The good Professor Knippenberg correctly points out that having religious reasons for pushing a particular policy is quite different from enacting a religious law.
As the professorial pundit puts it:
Yes, the FRC and Focus on the Family are religious groups. But what they are asking for is an up-or-down vote on judicial nominees, not a religious test for office-holding. Whatever faith or reasons move them, the position they’re actually supporting is consistent with long-standing Senate practice (actually voting on nominees). Yes, there’s a slippery slope somewhere, and the judiciary may be the only remaining bastion of secular liberalism, but the alternative is not theocracy, but rather sober constitutional jurisprudence.
The distinction is frequently lost on journos who have studied little more than how to write crisp paragraphs. Lefties conveniently forget their outrage over incursions into the secular realm when the religious conclusions are other than conservative or free market. See my AmSpec piece on an interesting situation in Alabama last year.
3 comments:
Well observed, Mr. Baker.
I do sorely miss having a Religious Left, just so's they'd get faith a place at the table of our polity beyond partisan politics.
They were always good with the money part, but imagine if they actually concerned themselves with our contemporary problems of human dignity.
The tension between the human dignity of individual freedom and taking care of the least of us led to the US constructing a pretty good darned nation.
The rest of the world seems trapped between tribalism and nihilism, which are tyrannical and impotent respectively.
Sadly, the good Doctor (and perhaps not so talented Senator) Frist took this debate in precisely the wrong direction by saying that the judicial issue was about the Democrats' prejudice against "people of faith".
The issue is that Democrats are using the power of judicial confirmation as an ideological weapon; whether one view or the other has religious backing should always be irrelevant.
Tlaloc, it is disturbing to me how determinedly ignorant you can occasionally be when you speak about religion. You have no concept as to how different the world is due to the influence of Judaism and Christianity versus how it might be.
I wish I could recall the name of the writer, but the unnamed person once said that the phenomenon of an ambulance being given deference by rush hour traffic and disrupting everything to come to the aid of a single human life could only happen in a Christian world. I think he is right, though Jay may say the Jews would uphold the same ideal.
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