Sunday, July 23, 2006

It takes two to argue...

...religious conservatives do, frequently and loudly, make arguments for their positions on non-theological grounds. Perhaps not as often as they should, to judge by the movement's repeated political and cultural defeats (defeats that the anti-theocrats gloss over, since it would complicate their portrait of an all-powerful Christofascism on the march). But the evils of abortion, the value of heterosexual monogamy, the costs of promiscuity and pornography?all these issues are constantly being raised by social conservatives without appeals to the divine inspiration of the Bible. Tellingly, when a professor at Patrick Henry College explains to Goldberg how he teaches students to 'use terms and facts that the other side accepts as reasonable,' she calls it a 'rhetorical two-step' and casts it as yet another example of the devious Christianist project of political infiltration: Heads you're a theocrat, tails you're a theocrat.
-Ross Douthat, Theocracy! Theocracy! Theocracy!



"Finnis's particular views... deriv[e] from the Thomist tradition of Catholic moral philosophy.... Finnis conceals those specifically religious purposes and misrepresents his argument as a secular, rational argument."
-Martha Nussbaum, Romer v. Evans

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