Thanks for your emails. Let me address three good counter-arguments. Many of you have argued that what passes for secularism today is not neutrality but active hostility to or disdain for religious faith. Here’s one formulation of the argument from an emailer:
There is unquestionably a brand of secularism that seeks to impose its own set of moral choices on all of society, e.g. the leftist hegemony that currently has a stranglehold on most universities. You yourself complained about this sort of thing in regards to Larry Summers’ lynching at the hands of the leftist establishment earlier this year.
Yes, indeed there is. One reason secularism is now threatened is because the left has abused it. I have no problem, for example, with public displays of Christian symbols in a secular society. I find the desire to root out such things as excessively persnickety. I’ve long been a defender of free speech and association for people with whom I disagree. (My conservative critics on the subject of homosexuality, for example, rarely point out that I oppose all hate crime laws, have opposed laws forbidding workplace discrimination, and supported the right of both the Boy Scouts and the St Patrick’s Day parade for discriminating against gays as private associations.) Moreover, when Christians form a majority, it’s understandable that much public symbolism will be redolent of Christian imagery and language. Secularists who want to stamp this stuff out seem to me to be lacking in the virtue of moderation – and they have helped spawn the intolerance that now flows back from the other side. At the same time, it’s silly for fundamentalists to say that they are being persecuted merely because others are treated equally in the public square. It is ludicrous for Rick Santorum to say, as he did recently, that my being allowed to marry my partner is somehow an attack on his marriage. A secular and tolerant society does not regard the rights of minorities as somehow only achievable at someone else’s expense. We are bigger than that. What is particularly remarkable is that when we are constructing a democracy abroad, say in Iraq, no one disputes the notion that it would be better for Iraq to have a secular constitution rather than a religious one. Yet these same people, when it comes to domestic politics and constitutionalism, want to insist that the American constitution is somehow a religious document. I prefer the perspective of this emailer:
I grew up in India and believed that secularism and multiculturalism were good things. This question was never even debated in my 24 years there. It is disconcerting to see that so many people in a supposedly much more enlightened country think that these are bad things.
Well, sadly, they do. And the people who believe these are bad things are the ruling faction in the dominant political party.
SECULARISM II: One other lesser point. There is obviously a distinction between the questions of same-sex marriage and abortion. With abortion, you can always claim that a life is at stake, and so neutrality, which would mean leaving the choice to individuals, is impermissible. But same-sex marriage involves no potential taking of human life and is an issue of far lesser moral import because of it. No one is tangibly hurt by someone’s public commitment to another human being. In such instances, government neutrality and secularism demand equal treatment, barring the kind of terrible social consequences no one has yet been able even to posit convincingly.
SECULARISM III: One final point. Many claim that there is no such thing as neutrality, that law is always and everywhere the imposition of one set of values over another, and that the question is merely “whose values?” Although this has a kind of late night college dorm plausibility, it essentially abandons the entire Western attempt to conceive of law as something that aims, in so far as it is possible, to provide neutral limits on human activity in order to protect the freedom of individuals to live as they see fit. Even if this will have cultural consequences, even if this may make some feel discriminated against, it is an essential goal of the liberal state to at least aspire to fairness, equal treatment of all citizens and tolerance of value-pluralism. In that sense, liberalism’s “value” is fairness, consensus and equality. And it is the only value that can appeal to Christianists, Christians, atheists, Jews, gays, straights, Muslims and Mormons alike. It is a value that may as often be celebrated when it fails as when it succeeds. And in an increasingly multicultural society, where all religions seem to be gravtitating toward fundamentalism, it is more valuable today than ever. Abandoning it, as the theocons and the leftist intolerants want, is to abandon Western freedom. I believe in fighting for such freedom both abroad and at home. In equal measure.
The Dish 