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Separation of Church and State, part whatever
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sol System: [QB] Really, Lee, this sort of thing isn't, and perhaps shouldn't be, a major issue. There are three kinds of groups that get involved in this sort of thing, to varying degrees, and in most cases they're the only ones who notice. I haven't followed this case, so I don't know who's doing what, beyond what one inevitably picks up, but in general, what I'm about to describe is how it goes. (That was very pretentious-sounding.) Anyway, on one side you have a small but politically powerful group of Christian fundamentalists. On their own the beliefs of these people would bar them from any serious engagement in the affairs of state. (This says nothing of the validity of said beliefs, just their minority status.) But they vote a lot, and anyone interested in broad right-wing appeal needs to at least acknowledge their existence. (One can take the centrist approach, ala Schwarzenegger, and try to shut out the minority extremist groups on both sides, but this is historically a much harder row to hoe, since almost by definition a movement designed to appeal to people from lots of different movements is going to have a much harder time organizing itself politically and getting the message out. That's what the whole party apparatus is for, after all.) On another (note, not [i]the[/i] other) side, you've got an even smaller bunch of hardcore athesists with a specific agenda of purging religious iconography, ala Madeline Murray O'Hare, but there are so few of these and they wield so little influence that they aren't real players, despite being the favorite punching bag of the fundamentalists. On the third side you have a bunch of people who are unified under a sometimes vague dedication to certain political principles, namely, in this case, a seperation between religious and governmental matters, and in the name of which they often pursue goals whose ideological importance far outweighs their practical impact. While one might wonder how visibly non-Christians fair in this judge's courtroom, but I'm not aware of anyone making claims about that. It isn't even on the table. So, I suppose what I am getting at is that, in the United States, this kind of conflict is rarely about what it seems to be about on the surface. On the one hand you have people who firmly believe that the United States is, or at least ought to be, a Christian polity in the classical mode, and putting the Ten Commandments up in courtrooms is only the symbol of a wide-ranging set of reforms. On the other, you have people who firmly believe that the United States was organized along explicitly multicultural, and thus multi-religious, lines, and who tend to see apparently minor seepage between church and state as warning signs of far more serious structural problems. Having said of all that (and surely having said too much), the mention of Lady Justice calls to mind Ashcroft's infamous decision to have the bare breasts of that particular icon covered up in a Department of Justice briefing room. One could argue that that was simply a matter of wanting firmer control of the press briefing environment. But lots of people didn't take it that simply. Symbology is where we spent a lot of our mental time, I think, and not without reason. Anyway, uh, there you go. (This sort of transatlantic bewilderment is surely also a result of official state churches, and thus official religous icons, being just a normal piece of history on one side.) [/QB][/QUOTE]
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