More on Fish
I probably won’t get to the other topics before I leave for the weekend. But I wanted to draw attention to Joel and Jason’s comments on my last post. Here we have a neo-Pagan and a Reformed Christian saying the same thing to Fish: “Hey, you’re painting with too broad a brush.”
In the first case, Joel is reminding us that not all religions are “totalizing”, and that some, by their very nature, are private. Thus it is not “eviscerating them” to ask their citizens to take part in a liberal democracy. Then, Jason is pointing out that even those religions which are generally understood to have totalizing tendancies have variations. (This fact would be part of my response to Fish’s (1) earlier, that although it is true that not everyone values what liberalism incorporates into its framework, there are probably elements in every culture that do.)
I did look at the Center for Public Justice website, and it is interesting. Below the fold are a few quotes (you’ll want to read them in context, of course). While perhaps CPJ could be a good counterbalance to Coral Ridge, we still have the original problem. Despite the presence of genuinely private religions and despite the variation among totalizing religions, the government and political framework cannot value one over the other. Thus it is invalid to set CPJ against Coral Ridge, or to use (neo)Paganism as a balance to Christianity. If private citizens want to frame debates in this way, bringing Kyuperian ideas as a third way, then great.
But the question still remains–what to do about folks who would like to, through the processes of democracy, instill a kind of theocratic rule? (This is a live question in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a different way.) Quotes from CPJ below the fold, for those interested.
Quotes from the Center for Public Justice documents:
A political community should not be fashioned as a community of faith, whether of Christian faith, secularist faith, or a general civil-religious faith. Rather, our republic should be constituted as a community of citizens that does not discriminate against anyone for reasons of faith. Consequently, all citizens should have equal access to and equal rights in the political community, regardless of faith – just as they should be so treated regardless of their skin color, gender, ethnicity, and social status. Christian efforts to promote a just society must therefore also include the aim to protect the religious freedom and other civil rights of all citizens – not only in their worship communities, but also in education, welfare services, and more. We refer to this notion as “confessional pluralism.”
http://www.cpjustice.org/guidelines/political_community.html
5. Homosexual relationships do not entail coitus and do not have the potential for life-generation. Consequently, such relationships neither constitute marriages nor, through procreative capability, can become families. The attempt to attain for a homosexual partnership the legal identification of marriage is thus a legal error based on an empirical mistake.
If “domestic partnerships” are given legal recognition for the purpose of opening certain health care and death benefits to homosexual partners, the same privileges should be made available to non-homosexual non-marital partners and friendships. It would be discriminatory to single out one kind of non-marital relationship for a privilege usually granted to marriage partners while denying that privilege to other kinds of enduring partnerships and committed friends.
http://www.cpjustice.org/guidelines/homosexuality.html
5. While government and citizens hold one another accountable under the law and to the law, the ultimate accountability of both is to God.