squinney wrote:In other words, you are lobbying to impose your religious beliefs on others. The laws of the land should be such that they impose or support no religious belief whatsoever.
That's an interesting principle. But I don't think it works that way in practice -- especially not in the context in which Momma Angel made her point. Without religious conviction, how do you decide in which month of a pregnancy an embryo comes close to being a person? Close enough that its right to live outweighs the mother's liberty to decide about her own body? One way or the other, you cannot answer such questions without moral views that are deeply held but unprovable. And Jesus is just as (un)reliable as a source of such convictions as Mary Wollestonecraft, John Stuart Mill, or Betty Friednan.
Squinney wrote:Is there an argument against same sex marriage that is not religious or due to religious belief?
From the top of my head, I can think of the argument from tradition and the argument from majority opinion. We both don't like either of them, but they are not religious arguments.
Squinney wrote: Is there a reason for inserting ID in science classes that is not religious?
How about the argument that schools are run by the government, government is controlled by majority vote, and the majority of the electorate believes that some version of creationism is what actually happened? That, by itself, is not a religious argument. Again, I don't like the majority belief here. On the other hand, I, unlike you, don't believe the government ought to be in the business of operating schools. The religious wars that currently occur in school boards would be much less of a problem in a voucherized school system.
Squinney wrote:Is there a reason for lobbying to overturn Roe that is not religious?
If "religious" is narrowly defined, yes. In 1975, the German Constitutional Court, operating in a constitutional human rights framework roughly comparable to America's, reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to "Roe v. Wade". It decided that abortion must be legal with a few enumerated exceptions, without using any religious argument to reach its decisions. On the other hand, if you define "religious" very broadly, any opposition to
Roe would be religious -- but so would be any lobbying to uphold it. As I said earlier, our ideological commitments in this matter greatly exceed our ability to prove them rationally, and this is true for both sides of the debate.
Squinney wrote:Lobbying to support same sex marriage infringes on no one. Lobbying to keep ID out of science classes - because it isn't science - hurts no one. Supporting a womans right to choose leaves the responsibility for the decision on the individual where it belongs. (You won't go to hell for someone else having an abortion)
You are assuming your conclusion. If you were religious, this argument would strike you as a classic example of the "my **** don't stink" fallacy. (The same fallacy you accuse evangelicals of -- I think correctly.) If it was true that gay marriage undermines society, supporting it would hurt people. If it was true that god created the earth 7000 years ago, it would hurt children to not have that truth taught to them. If it was true that embryos are persons from the moment of conception, "a woman's right to choose" would get people killed. I happen to agree with your conclusions, but that doesn't change the fact that you are assuming them -- arguably on the basis of ideological convictions that aren't very different from religious motives.
And you want to impose those convictions on Christians just as much as Momma Angel wants to impose hers on agnostics and atheists.
