Opinion: DeSantis 2024?

[Dill]

(04-06-2023, 04:20 PM)pally Wrote: Joe Biden, unlike conservative evangelicals, that in a country based on civil laws he does not have the right to force his personal religious beliefs onto anyone else

therefore contraception and abortion are choices

treatment decisions for gender dysmorphia belong with the patient, their family, and their medical team

and same sex marriage is governed by civil laws not religious beliefs

Yes. And the first great exponents of modern social contract theory--Hobbes and Locke--devoted hundreds of pages to explaining how and where civil order had to be separated from religious order for liberal democracy to function.  

This hardly surprising, as Hobbes and Locke both lived through a religious civil war in England at the same time one was also going on in Europe. 

The U.S. founders were still close to this history and its lessons, which was why they chose not to establish the U.S. government on a religion, as
many states still did at the time of the founding. That's why we have government officials upholding laws that go against their religious beliefs. And that's why fundamentalists unfamiliar with this history constantly complain that "God" has been excluded from government and schools (sometimes that's their explanation for school shootings!). 

This necessary secularization has never been complete though ("In God we trust," "one nation, under God").