Tuesday, April 15, 2003

More City Journal: I admit that I'm disappointed, but not surprised, that the City Journal piece doesn't state more forcefully a position of moral neutrality, given that one can find this kind of argument there:
The Court has subjected the First Amendment to a stiff dose of “power judging” as well. It has used the amendment’s religion clause—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—to erect a nearly impassable “wall of separation” between church and state, a wall that the Framers never envisioned. Washington, for example, thought religion “indispensable” to the “dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity”—a view that seems to belong to a different universe from a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that a short, freely chosen, nonsectarian, and non-proselytizing prayer delivered by a student before a high school football game represented an unconstitutional establishment of religion.
Like I said, the sorts of beliefs various crowds are pushing all sound like religion to me: belief in something unreasonable, depite a dearth of proof. In the end, if you want to pray at home, great. If you want to fist at home, that's also great. Just don't try to tell my kid how "great" either practice is. His mother and I will have those discussions with him when the time comes. How hard is that to understand?

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