The always insightful UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh has an interesting post on his blog in which he addresses the fallacy of the common argument in political debates that “we don’t like the other side attempting to impose their beliefs on us.” Professor Volokh points out:
. . . as it happens, many laws — civil rights laws, for instance — were motivated by religious opinions (it’s the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., you might recall). But more importantly, all of our opinions are ultimately based on unproven and unprovable moral premises. For some of us, the moral premises are secular; for others, they’re religious; I don’t see why the former are somehow more acceptable than the latter. And the slogan “separation of church and state” hardly resolves anything here: Churches may have no legal role in our government, but religious believers are just as entitled to vote their views into law as are atheists or agnostics.
Of course, it’s perfectly sound to disagree with people’s views on the merits: If I don’t agree with the substance of someone’s proposal, whether it’s religious or secular, I’ll certainly criticize the substance. And naturally people will often find others’ religious arguments unpersuasive — “ban this because God said so” isn’t going to persuade someone who doesn’t believe in God, or who has a different view of God’s will. (Likewise, many devout Christians may find unpersuasive arguments that completely fail to engage devout Christians’ religious beliefs.) But there’s nothing at all illegitimate about people making up their own minds about which laws to enact based on their own unprovable religious moral beliefs, or on their own unprovable secular moral beliefs.
Meanwhile, this Logos blog post points to a couple of interesting op-eds on the gay marriage debate, and includes the following passage on marriage and divorce from the late great Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, which includes a great observation from Mr. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” regarding his well-known affection for wine:
Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one; the other is the quite different question — how far Christians, if they are voters or members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.”
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