Who doesn’t understand this, Rence?
That’s why they aren’t.
What you get as a Catholic, and what meltzerboy gets as a Jew, is the inalienable right to practice your religion and apply that understanding of your personal religious values in how you vote, how you influence legislators, how you debate in the secular arena. That’s what freedom of religion gives you. There is no U.S. Constitution which mandates freedom from religion, and no “inalienable right” which gives all unbelievers virtual earplugs over what believers say about legislation, and the moral underpinnings on which legislation is actually built. There is no Constitutional guarantee that society is entitled to be free from discussion of religion, including how such beliefs form the priorities and preferences of other voters.
So, meltzerboy and Rence, you are part of this pluralistic, multicultural society. So are other Catholics, other Jews, so are Baptists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and atheists. You two don’t need to apply your reliigous upbringing to the secular sphere if you feel guilty about “forcing” your inalienable right to personal belief on society. But others don’t feel so guilty, and they have no requirement to be bound by your guilt, or your choice not to exercise your constitutional right. And rather than they having “no right” to express their beliefs, it is you two who have no constitutional right to argue that they should not express theirs. You have this backwards.
And to state that lobbying, even informally, for a particular point of view which incidentally stems a little or a lot from a religious philosophy, is equal to a “theocracy” reveals a misunderstanding of that word. Our Founding Documents prevent, permanently (barring an unlikely Constitutional Amendment) a theocracy from ever occurring, as that would directly oppose our governmental structure. The fact that there can be no formal alliance between a particular religion and the U.S. government cannot be legally interpreted to mean that citizens, including those wearing yarmulkes or Roman collars, have also been stripped of their rights to speak publicly about their religious views. American Jews are among the most politically activist of all religions, consciously applying Jewish morality to legislation. I’m surprised at you, meltzerboy. And it is one of the reasons that Jews are heavily represented in Congress and in the field of law: because they care about moral issues and understand that moral issues are applied – not just mentioned at temple on Saturdays.
