{"id":33,"date":"2010-07-13T20:49:40","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T20:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/its-all-scalias-fault.html"},"modified":"2010-07-13T20:49:40","modified_gmt":"2010-07-13T20:49:40","slug":"its-all-scalias-fault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/its-all-scalias-fault.html","title":{"rendered":"It’s all Scalia’s fault"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever alert for Republican wackiness, TPM calls
\nour attention<\/a> to a recent TV interview with Ed Martin, who’s got
\nthe GOP nomination to run against Rep. Russ Carnahan to represent
\nMissouri’s Third District in Congress. <\/p>\n

One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of
\nour
\ngenetics. We’re great because we created a place and space where people
\ncan be free. And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful.
\nThey can worship, and they find their way to the Lord. And — or some
\nof them don’t. We sure want them all to, but some of them don’t.<\/p>\n

Part of that freedom — when you take a government and you impose,
\nand take away all your choices. One of the choices you take away is to
\nfind the Lord. And to find your savior. <\/p>\n

And that’s one of the things that’s most destructive about the
\ngrowth
\nof government. It’s this taking away of that freedom. The freedom —
\nthe ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And
\nto find Christ, for me and you.<\/p>\n

And I think that’s one of the things that we have to be very, very
\naware of. That the Obama Administration and Congressman Carnahan are
\ndoing to us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There’s no indication that if Martin were asked to connect the dots,
\nhe could point to any specific way that the “growth of government” under
\nObama and Carnahan has undermined the ability of Americans to find
\nChrist. It’s just that O\/C = big govt = no ultimate freedom. But there
\nis a plausible recent example of such undermining, at least if taking up
\ncudgels on the conservative side of the culture wars appeals to you.
\nIt’s the Supreme Court’s decision<\/a>
\nin Christian Legal Society<\/i> v. Martinez<\/i>, which upheld the
\nright of the Hastings School of Law to deny official status to the
\nschool’s chapter of the Christian Legal Society for having a policy of
\nexcluding non-repentant gays and lesbians.\n<\/p>\n

The only trouble is that if you want to blame someone for putting us
\non the road to serfdo…er, Christian Legal Society,<\/i> it should be
\nthat paragon of constitutional originalism, Antonin Scalia, who in 1990
\npersuaded four mostly conservative justices to go his way in Employment
\nDivision<\/i> v. Smith<\/i>. That decision made it impossible for the
\n“pro-religion” conservatives on the current court to actually argue on
\nbehalf of the constitutional guarantee of religious free exercise. The
\nHastings policy that officially recognized student groups must admit all
\ncomers may be idiotic (a Democratic club must admit Republicans?), but
\nit’s neutral and generally applicable–the Smith standard.<\/p>\n

However, if you look at, say, Timothy Dalrymple’s critique<\/a>
\nof CLS<\/i> over at Patheos, you’ll find nary a mention of Smith<\/i>.
\nDalrymple is more than prepared to believe that the court majority
\nacted against religious interests, but in fact, thanks to Smith<\/i>,
\nthere never had to be a balancing of the right of free exercise against
\nthe principle of equality embodied by an “all comers” policy. And the
\nfact is, there’s real tension between the two that we as a society, and
\nthe Supreme Court as the arbiter of the Constitution, ought to face up
\nto. \n<\/p>\n

As retired Justice David Souter said in his Harvard commencement
\naddress<\/a>,”The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of
\nhard cases are
\nhard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the
\ncases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.” One of
\nthe worst features of today’s blog-eat-blog world is that it allows us to
\npretend that there are lots of easy answers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever alert for Republican wackiness, TPM calls our attention to a recent TV interview with Ed Martin, who’s got the GOP nomination to run against Rep. Russ Carnahan to represent Missouri’s Third District in Congress. One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We’re great because we created…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nIt's all Scalia's fault - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/its-all-scalias-fault.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"It's all Scalia's fault - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ever alert for Republican wackiness, TPM calls our attention to a recent TV interview with Ed Martin, who’s got the GOP nomination to run against Rep. Russ Carnahan to represent Missouri’s Third District in Congress. One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We’re great because we created…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/its-all-scalias-fault.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-07-13T20:49:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"It's all Scalia's fault - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/its-all-scalias-fault.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"It's all Scalia's fault - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Ever alert for Republican wackiness, TPM calls our attention to a recent TV interview with Ed Martin, who’s got the GOP nomination to run against Rep. Russ Carnahan to represent Missouri’s Third District in Congress. One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}