It’s not the government’s place to fund religious activity.
You know the modern conception we have of ‘separation of church and state’ is a fairly new political innovation that wasn’t historically there. Originally, there was nothing that precluded a state from adopting an official religion, if it wanted to.
Even if it is a new innovation, it’s clearly a good innovation and we should stick by it.
Good perhaps according to your political sentiments. But that’s no different than anyone who scores a point in favor of what they deem to be progressive. “Anything that goes the way I want it to is a good thing.” Hardly a principled position if one cares about freedom and liberty.
“Anything that goes the way I want it to is a good thing.”
??? What… what is your definition of “good” if not this? The only way this could possibly not be true is if you want a bad outcome, for some reason. Everyone believes the outcome they want is a good one.
Also, if you care about freedom and liberty, the government not doing religious stuff is a pretty important principle for maintaining that.
I don’t agree with most of the domestic policies in the US, but I respect freedom and liberty enough to hold to it, even when the outcomes it produces oppose my political beliefs; by 180 degrees. If you abandon the principle which says states as experiments are permitted to adopt an official religion, should they choose to follow that path, you’re not someone that cares about freedom and liberty. Full stop.
This same argument is at play even among most liberal idiots who hated Donald Trump, but still refused to condemn the western democratic values and process that put someone like him into office. They either hold to the ideal, or they’re (more plausibly) too stupid to recognize such an explicit contradiction in their own beliefs.
I respect the freedom of individuals over the freedom of states. I therefore do not believe any country should have a state religion, unless you could somehow guarantee that there were no people in the country who would disagree with and be oppressed by the state religion. I care more about the right of religious minorities to not have a religion they disagree with imposed on them than I do the “right” of the majority to impose their will on the minority.
And I don’t care for representative democracy, at least not in its current form, or the laws and institutions of the US, but come on now. Do you respect every politician who comes to power legitimately in your country? Of course not. That doesn’t make you a hypocrite, and the same is true for liberals. Besides, many liberals–and again, I am not a liberal–openly believe that many of the processes that led to Trump being elected (such as the electoral college, gerrymandering, first-past-the-post voting, etc.) are illegitimate. It wasn’t just “Western democracy” that got Trump elected; it was a very specific sort of Western democracy that a lot of liberals would prefer to reform.
What are states compromised of if not the very individuals they’re tasked with representing? Seems to me like you’re trying to use some very tortured logic to have it both ways. If Utah voted in Mormonism as the official state religion, I certainly wouldn’t like it nor want to live there. Nor would I ‘have’ to live there. But that comes with the territory of allowing states (not the federal government), to vote in an official religion, ‘if that’s what the people vote for’. And you’re not at liberty to deny them that. Your basic rights as a citizen you’re still entitled to under federal law, and no state can take that away from you.
Now if you don’t care about representative democracy, then fine; fair enough. But don’t hide your argument behind a pretense about how a political belief you agree with supersedes the will of the population, ‘even if it were opposed by the will and dictates of the citizens and they held otherwise’, and then claim to care about the principle, even if as a counter-factual. Of course I don’t like or respect ’every’ politician, but that isn’t the point of the argument. And I think the word “reform” is doing you far too much work, in disguising the intent of liberals who in reality, would desire to remake the entire political system in their own image. Even as a pretty far right leaning conservative (though not Republican) myself, I wouldn’t desire that, even on my side of the aisle.
