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02:36 PM - Tanking on the Right Rightank thrice misconstrues the nature of separationist opposition to Judge Alito. Firstly, the AU report does not object to Alito’s “willingness to protect the rights of religious majorities in the public square” but rather his willingness to disregard the rights of religious minorities in the public square. I’ll admit that this is a difficult balancing act, but Alito’s view is unfairly unbalanced, favoring majoritarian religious expressions trumping the rights of religious minorities to freely exercise religion at a time, place, and manner of their own choosing. Free exercise ought to be an individual right, not a majority privilege. Moreover, Alito does not treat “religious speech as protected by the Constititution instead of forbidden,” rather, he treats only the majority view as protected, and hopes to squelch the free exercise of religious minorities in public schools by establishing majoritarianism. Rightank, like Alito in Child Evangelism, makes no “attempt to distinguish between official school activities involving school personnel, on the one hand, and private, after-school religious meetings, on the other.” The former is a form of religious establishment, the latter a form of free exercise. Finally, AU (unlike Justice O’Connor) has never claimed that the First Amendment guarantees “equality of religious expression.” They have not attempted to mandate anything resembling an equal time doctrine for religious minorities in the secular public square generally or the public schools in particular. Quite the opposite, AU prefers to leave religious education to the home and the church, just as the Founders intended. Recall that laudatory “religious freedom that the Founding Fathers intended to bestow upon the American people” belonged properly to the people rather than a coercive government bueracracy. Seeking to empower the latter at the expence of the former is not at all unapologetically conservative; contrapuntally, it is anti-conservative apologetics. (
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