Religious views justified

The Bruin Democrats’ campaign this week focuses much
attention on the separation of church and state, but the precise
issues that they focus on are out of the scope of the First
Amendment’s provisions, and their own arguments come
dangerously close to violating the very freedoms they purport to
protect.

They are saying that no law or policy may be rooted in ideals
that an individual derives from religion. The Bruin
Democrats’ argument that religion has no place in shaping
public policy, because not everyone has the same religion, is not
only logically flawed but highly undemocratic.

After all, even among secularists, not everyone shares the same
worldview or ideological structure. Are we to make policy only by
consensus, or are we supposed to allow elites to tell us what is
and what is not an acceptable thought?

Some will say that religion is insufficiently rational, but
surely many derive their views from all sorts of non-empirical
sources. How many liberals claim to hold beliefs based on feelings?
How many people advocate policies based on what ideological
“team” they identify with, with little or no rational
analysis?

Should all these people be disenfranchised as well?

Now I agree with them that there are problems with certain
“faith-based” laws that make moral judgments solely on
a religious basis. There are many unconstitutional laws in the gray
area of “victimless crimes,” including laws of sodomy
that go so far as to put governmental restrictions on the way
couples have relations in their own homes.

While this is part of what the Bruin Democrats are arguing
against, it is far from their core consideration. I feel the need
to bring to light the religious motivation in our political history
and among our founding fathers.

The first line of the First Amendment reads “Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

This only says that Congress cannot do anything to regulate the
people’s practice of religion either in their private lives
or at the higher levels of an established religion (of course,
assuming that these practices do not infringe on others’
rights).

They cannot establish a national religion, ban a specific
religion or keep someone from performing a specific religious
practice.

But the injunction ends there.

The First Amendment does not mandate a secular thought police.
Rather, it is itself derived from these very same religious values.
Simply look at the Declaration of Independence, which refers to
“Nature’s God” and people’s rights being
“endowed by their Creator.”

The very thing that gave our founding fathers the ideals upon
which this nation and its constitution are based is their belief in
God and sense of morality, justice and individual rights derived
from these beliefs. They did not intend for a specific, imposed
religion, but made the American heritage one of freedom because of
basic, nonspecific morals based on rights endowed by our
Creator.

Even nearly a century later, it was a belief in God and his
morals that inspired abolitionist movements and gave Harriet Tubman
the nickname “Moses,” and a century after that inspired
much of the civil rights movement.

Religious values also led many, especially the Quakers, to
oppose the Vietnam War, and I seriously doubt that the Bruin
Democrats would say the Quakers and the various priests and
ministers who preached against the war should have stayed silent
because their religious values were inherently illegitimate.

There is no justification for the intrusion of government into
its people’s lives when they are not harming others, and
religion can be used as a mask for this very thing not just at
home, but around the world, especially in theocratic countries like
Saudi Arabia.

But the ideals of freedom, justice and equality upon which this
great nation and all other true democracies are based would not
have come about without a belief in a higher being and the morality
derived from this.

Napolitano is a fourth-year biology student.