Religion & Law

[Chip has indicated that this will be his final comment in the to-and-fro with Robby.]

There is no point in beating up on the New York Times.  The reporter read to me in advance what she was attributing to me.  I did not know that "fear-mongering" was in quotation marks.  But, in the rush of the conversation, I was more concerned with the accuracy of the rest of the quote, and so did not focus on the offending word until it was too late.  And I do believe -- and I said this to the reporter, which led her to choose that word -- that the Declaration, like the anti-Prop 8 campaign, stokes unfounded fears among religious conservatives, whether or not it is designed to do so.



Robby thinks that I am insufficiently sensitive to pro-life convictions and rights to religious liberty.  I think he is utterly insensitive to competing rights and interests -- those of pregnant women, and of members of same-sex couples.  I try to balance the competing rights; he doesn't.  Enough said.



As to the purely religious content of the Declaration -- at whom were the passages on marriage aimed?  If they were aimed at the faithful, they are unobjectionable. If, however, they were aimed at lawmakers, they are entirely objectionable as an attempt to persuade those who exercise state power to impose an exclusively religious view on the law of marriage.  The Constitution forbids the state from restricting liberty based on exclusively religious reasons. Robby, I believe, was a defender of the regime that was legitimated by Bowers v. Hardwick, which allowed for the criminalization of same-sex intimacy.  Until Bowers was overruled by Lawrence v. Texas, that too involved the use of legal machinery to impose a view that had no secular justification. If aimed at lawmakers, the Declaration's passages on marriage -- wholly devoid of any secular justification for prohibiting same-sex marriage -- are a replay of that.