Right Left Whatever

Religion, Government, and the Religious Test

Kevin Seamus Hasson, author of The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America discusses religion and politics in an interview with National Review Online.

His opinion of the greatest threat to religious libery:

The biggest threat comes from people who think that religious truth is the enemy of human freedom — that the only good religion is a relativist one.

My experience in the Unitarian Universalist Association introduced me to many people who share that opinion, some of whom even told me that it was "wrong" for Christians to vote according to their religious beliefs (I think he meant "incorrect" rather than "illegal", at least I hope so). Of course, there is no way consistent with freedom of conscience to disallow votes of religious believers, and the prohibition of the "religious test" by our Constitution is a limitation of the powers of government, not on individual voters, who are free to vote any way they wish.

How does the "religious test" prohibition apply to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court? The "religious test", proscribed by our Constitution, does apply to members of the Senate in their confirmation vote, as Hasson notes, however I think it also applies to President Bush. Of course the President is to be allowed the prerogative to select a nominee for whatever reason he thinks makes a person well-qualified (including their personal beliefs), but that prerogative does not extend to allowing the issue of religious belief to be a justification of her nomination in the face of critical questioning. Justifying her nomination on the basis of her religious belief is in effect asking the Senate to apply a religious test in her favor. I don't really care that she is an evangelical Christian (well actually I do, but not in respect to her SCOTUS nomination), I just want her to know the Constitution, and interpret it in a way consistent with the way Alexander Hamilton and James Madison did (authors of The Federalist Papers so we know what they were thinking), and to be able to defend her decisions with solid reasoning, and not appeals to personal belief of "the right thing to do". Based on what I've read about her so far, I'm inclined to say that she should not be confirmed.

Posted by Joel Fuhrmann at October 18, 2005 10:08 PM