Legal Commentary

Fred Gedicks of BYU (visiting at Notre Dame) has posted a wonderful paper on SSRN called Truth and Consequences: Mitt Romney, Proposition 8, and Public Reason.  It addresses the "deployment of religious truth-claims in electoral politics," and uses two nicely contrasting examples: Mitt Romney's defense of the irrelevance of his Mormon faith to his candidacy for the presidency, and the Latter-Day Saints' advocacy in the Prop. 8 debate of "'true' or 'divine' principles that it believes ought to be enforced by law and reflected in public policy."  He asks: "How upset are folks entitled to get when their church is labeled 'false' in an electoral campaign, if the church itself regularly participates in such campaigns on the basis of religious truth and falsity?"  Here's another snippet from the abstract:

I will argue that in contemporary electoral politics, attacks on the truth of a religion make little sense in light of the pluralism and postmodernism that now characterize the contemporary United States, but are a likely consequence when the religion itself introduces such truth-claims into electoral politics. . . . The multiplicity, indeterminacy, customization, and ubiquity of contemporary religious truth-claims now prevent any religion from plausibly asserting in public contexts that its claims are true to the exclusion of all others. In a plural and postmodern culture like that of the United States, the introduction of religious truth-claims into electoral campaigns presents distinct disadvantages and dangers to liberal democracy, particularly when done from the right. I illustrate the deleterious effects of such claims, and the corresponding virtues of public reason, by reference to the attacks on Romney's Mormonism during the Republican primaries and the Mormon church's support of Proposition 8. I close with some observations about the necessary priority of pluralism to truth in electoral politics.