Feb 1, 2010 by Bruce
Forfeiting your religion to exercise your rights
I waded into a discussion of the apparent trial strategy of the anti-Prop 8 legal team of Olson and Boies to attack religion in the Perry case in an earlier post.
The always-incisive Al Mohler takes on the issue in a much more extensive way in this column addressing this Time Magazine article. Mohler’s key graph:
Boies’ argument finds its roots in philosophies of public reason such as those proposed by Robert Audi and the late John Rawls. Rawls argued that a liberal society must require the exclusion of all “comprehensive doctrines,” by which he meant religious worldviews. Audi argues that public discussion — and certainly any legislative or judicial forum — must require all parties to come to the table with both a secular rationale and a secular motivation. In his words, all parties have an “obligation to abstain from advocacy or support of a law or public policy that restricts human conduct, unless in advocating or supporting it one is sufficiently motivated by . . . adequate secular reason.”
So what do you believe? Should a religious worldview be a disqualifier for participating in the enactment of our nation’s laws? I don’t think there’s a middle ground on this one. You’re either all in, or all out.
