{"id":6057,"date":"2005-06-28T09:44:44","date_gmt":"2005-06-28T09:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/decaloguing.html"},"modified":"2005-06-28T09:44:44","modified_gmt":"2005-06-28T09:44:44","slug":"decaloguing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/decaloguing.html","title":{"rendered":"Decaloguing"},"content":{"rendered":"

In listening to Talk of the Nation<\/em> on NPR yesterday, I heard one of the participants in the discussion on the 10 Commandments ruling opine that secularists were spending a lot of energy on religious symbols cases, and not coming out with any clear victories on them, and meanwhile they were losing in the more substantive area of government – religion interesection: school vouchers and government support for faith-based charities. <\/p>\n

In other words, I suppose he was saying, stop wasting your time on granite plaques, secularists…<\/p>\n

Discussions at SCOTUS <\/a> and Mirror of Justice<\/a>. From Rick Garnett at the latter:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

For me, the most striking (for now, anyway) thing to come out of the decisions is Justice Breyer’s putting at the center of the Establishment Clause inquiry his predictions and observations about "political divisiveness" and "social conflict."  In his view, it appears that avoiding social dissension is more than a policy desideratum or a prudent aspiration. It is, somehow, a fundamental, judicially enforceable religion clause "principle".  This view takes us back to then-Chief Justice Warren Burger’s statement, in the landmark case of Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), that "political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect."  Burger foresaw "considerable political activity" on the part of "partisans of parochial schools," and would have none of it.  Such activity, he feared, "would tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency."<\/p>\n

As I’ve said before<\/span><\/a>, it is not clear why our political, cultural, and other "divisions" should be relevant to the legal question of whether a particular policy is constitutionally permissible. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR yesterday, I heard one of the participants in the discussion on the 10 Commandments ruling opine that secularists were spending a lot of energy on religious symbols cases, and not coming out with any clear victories on them, and meanwhile they were losing in the more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDecaloguing - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/decaloguing.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Decaloguing - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}