Religion & Law

In the paper I linked to earlier today, Jeremy Waldron challenges secularist premises regarding the nature of religious argument on controversial political issues:

The secularist view seems to be that a person of faith engaged in a political debate will ? if he is allowed ? simply cite some verse of scripture which he finds dispositive of the issue and then stand pat, impervious to argument.

[However, w]hen I read the Catholic case against gay marriage, for example, I am not convinced by it; but I find there is very little Leviticus-quoting or invocation of papal authority. What I read are elaborate tissues of argument and reason, open to disputation and vulnerable in the usual way to quibble, rejoinder, and refutation. . . . [A]ctually what?s infuriating about people like Finnis is not any adamantine fundamentalism but their determination to actually argue on matters that many secular liberals think should be beyond argument, matters that we think should be determined by shared sentiment or conviction. My experience is that many who are convinced of the gay rights position are upset more by the fact that their argumentative religious opponents refuse to take the liberal position for granted than they are by the more peremptory tactics of the ?bible-bashers.?