June 30, 2005
SCOTUS on GOD
Great article in New Republic, by Leon Wieseltier, on both the Scalia dissent and the Rehnquist majority in the two Ten Commandments cases (which I talk about in the previous post), and how far both wandered from the path of legal analysis. Here's the final paragraph:
It is not the task of this Court, or any other Court, to suggest what God there is, or is not. This is an arrogance beyond any judicial activism. Judges do not know that there is a Supreme Being any more certainly than anybody else. (And at some point in the consideration of whether our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being we really must consider whether there is a Supreme Being.) There are democracies in the world that were conceived and implemented by religious people, and there are democracies in the world that were conceived and implemented by secular people. Religion has never secured any country or culture against immorality, and neither has irreligion. And there is something risible about the anxiety that religion is imperiled in America. To feel sorry for religion in America is a great waste of pity. Who in America is prevented from believing and practicing what religion? I understand that many God-fearing Americans think that they are living in the wilderness, but they are wrong. They are living in the metropolis, and in some respects they are ruling it. In his magnificent dissent in Zorach, written "[a]s one whose children, as a matter of free choice, have been sent to privately supported Church schools," Justice Jackson insisted that the opposition to release time for religious children in New York's public schools was not "anti-religious, atheistic, or agnostic." And he added: "My evangelistic brethren confuse an objection to compulsion with an objection to religion. It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar." The same may be said about our own evangelistic brethren. It is an infirm faith indeed that can be exalted by that cheesy slab of constitutionally protected stone in Austin.
posted by scott pilutik at June 30, 2005 12:43 AM