Of course it does. If I say "We should protect this town from contaminating the water supply due to fracking" and some nutjob who was elected to congress says "Fuck that, God says fracking is A-OK! Frack on!", my argument is based on science and reason, the opposition's argument is based on bullshit. I win.
Yet other arguments that are not based on religion remain valid
You don't seem to understand.. If an argument is based on religion, but still has valid scientific evidence that supports it, it's fine. If an argument is based on religion, but DOES NOT have valid scientific evidence that supports it, it's gone. Simple, right?
Yeah sure, you might try.. But what if the majority of the population agreed with it? Should we deny equal civil rights to females because the bible says they should be subservient to men and the American population was stupid enough to buy some politicians argument based in scripture? Ever heard the religious arguments against the 19th amendment? Using your logic, women should not have the right to vote. Using my logic they should, because the argument against giving them the right to vote stems from organized religion. There is no other legitimate basis not to allow women to vote outside of religion.
You're missing the forest for the trees.
The point is far more narrow than you're trying to argue above. The question is, do we permit elected officials to envoke religious beliefs through the discharge of their duties. I say yes, you say no.
To your fracking comparison, it isn't valid because you have the religious saying allow it, and the science saying not to...
I'll use that to illustrate to you how I think we ought to do this, and I think we largely do.
Mayor of town says "Jesus came to me in a dream last night and said I should stop the gas company from destroying our water supply. To that end I will not sign the permit they are asking for."
It makes no difference here if he said allow it or disallow it.
If he had said Jesus told him to sign it for jobs, it's the same potential problem.
I interpret your stance to be any law made using religious justification should be void.
So imeadetly someone is going to challenge his decision, if he denies, the gas co. If he allows, the residents affected will seek higher legal remedies.
Upon review, it is clear there is a religious motivation behind this law, the mayor said so. But it's moot. It is non active. The gas co cant claim religious oppression because there are other valid resons for denying the permit. The residents cant claim it because gas co has mineral rights and fracking is legal overall.
If some mayor gets up and says "since Sunday should be holy, no businesses can be open in this town on that day."
Here is where it gets tricky... Should we allow this? I say yes... Until someone wants to stay open on Sunday. If the entire town is in unanimous agreement, no harm. So let them pass the law. The moment this is challenged it will fall. It is a religiously motivated law and will not stand in any state court these days.
What's the alternative? To do things the way you want would require setting up some sort of police agency for enforcement of these laws. Resources required would be huge. And we would have to crack down on people who are just speaking. It would be terribly difficult to enforce. This agency would have to have lots of power. They would have to go after people who would then code their talk, instead of talking openly as now, it would be coded more, and these people would have to connect lots of dots to act and mistakes would be made.
Why introduce such a cumbersome process and army of speech cops into the process when we have such a good way of keeping religious nonsense out of our laws now?
To the extent we have religious legal abuse, it is mostly in old laws that have been around for a long time. New law introduced is much harder to get through it it has religious conflicts.
