Are we sure Palin isn't thinking of the guy from the Jeffersons?
I've never gotten what's so hard about this whole issue. Why would anyone want the government having any role in religious matters at all? Any power exercised by the government is power taken from the people. But the people have no need to give up that authority. They do not need government instruction on when and how and if to pray.
So, UK, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, and Norway are all "in turmoil?" Because all of those states have official religion and no "wall."
(That is not to say that our Constitution permits an official Church, but to point out that Biden has no clue).
Although they may have an "official" state religion, the UK, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, and Norway are all de facto far more secular than the US.
So, I think his point stands.
Look at (Northern) Ireland or Lebanon or Pakistan for good examples of what he's talking about.
Actually, I don't think that Greece is even remotely more "secular" than we are. For instance, see Greek Constitution Art. 3 Sec. 3. "The text of the Holy Scripture shall be maintained unaltered. Official translation of the text into any other form of language, without prior sanction by the Autocephalous Church of Greece and the Great Church of Christ in Constantinople, is prohibited." Seems to me that that is a pretty serious involvement in private religious affairs by the State.
Other states collect taxes in support of their Churches.
So, I don't know what you mean that other countries are de facto more secular. If you mean that people are less religious, that may be so (though again, I think Greece is an exception). But that makes the state involvement in religious affairs even more galling and problematic. Yet, there is no strife.
Yeah, Palin's Jefferson quote is made up. And she makes no attempt to address the issue of the separation of church and state and her position on how much separation there should be.
Biden's answer is better, but still not spot on. His appeal to history is correct in that the founding fathers were concerned about the centuries of religious wars from the crusades up through the protestant reformation. DrGrishka refers rightly to stable countries that have an established church (though Italy, Spain, and Sweden do not have established churches any longer). However, their elected governments today are run functionally on a quite secular basis. Theocratic nations do tend towards turmoil.
Biden used the word "every"--which is rather synonymous with "all." Frankly, whether Palin "made up" the Jefferson quote or not, it was a better, less disingenuous answer than Biden's.
Although they may have an "official" state religion, the UK, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, and Norway are all de facto far more secular than the US.
Are you talking about their culture or their laws?
Also, is the French law, which allows for the banning of headscarves, etc more or less secular than the way we handle these things in the US? And does more secular equate to greater separation between church and state?
If rights are declared to be endowed by our Creator rather than granted by some kind of collective agreement, is one declaration more or less secular than the other?
If the state has a de facto monopoly on education and forbids teachers working for the state from expressing religious views, this would seem to be a positive promotion of the secular by the state, and would in that sense be more secular than a situation in which there were many viable options for receiving religious educations. But does one situation maintain a greater separation between church and state than the other?
Palin clearly shows an inexperience in discussing these issues. Or maybe even thinking about them. She could have answered much better. Biden did well. I can't stand the guy, but he did well here.
You are right, he did use the word "almost"--but he used it following two sentences that began "Look at every state" to imply ALL states. I agree he has some wiggle room (he could say, "I really didn't mean Norway or Greece") but that is certainly not the impression his answer gives.
Look, I know this is a law blog, so people are going to just naturally think that a president’s knowledge of the law is of premier importance. But step back for a moment. I could just as well say “Senator Obama, what are the Zeroth, First, Second, and Third Laws of Thermodynamics? Or any one of them? Basic geology? A little chem? Since you can’t, do you have the right to govern us on energy and climate issues?” or “Senator McCain, what is Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage? Since you don’t know that 101 level of economics, how the hell will you manage the world’s largets economy?” or “Senator Biden, stroke is the third largest killer in the US. What research initiatives are in Obama’s health plan that address this? Or actually, tell us anything you might know about medicine or public health. Anything at all.” What do any of them know about management? Or international trade? McCain knows a lot more about military strategy than the other three, but he still doesn’t know enough to move an inch without advisors. In a general way, what do we expect presidents to know?
Palin on Roe is an excellent example. She knows that an earlier Supreme Court held that there is a right to abortion and that it is currently the law of the land. She knows it’s not specifically in the constitution. She knows that some respected conservative (and not-so-conservative) legal minds have held that Roe is bad law. What else does a president need to know? Anything after that point would involve knowing who to trust more than knowing constitutional law. Even if she can only go in up to her ankles, Biden and Obama can only go in up to their knees, even though they have taught the subject. If anything, people who know more than average are more likely to stupidly think they know it all. (See Biden, 14th Amendment).
I could oversimplify that Bush’s egregious miscalculation of how much he could trust Vlad Putin in the summer of 2001 was his greatest mistake. Much of our later dealing with the UN, Europe, and the Middle East was affected by our over-optimistic hope that Russia would join the company of semi-sane nations and support containment of jihadists rather than exploit that chaos.
I am not arguing that her lack of knowledge is actually an advantage. Of course it’s a disadvantage. But it is nowhere near the disadvantage people are painting it. SNL’s joke about “Can I use a lifeline?” inadvertently hit on this subject. It’s not a quiz show. When we act like it is, it is we who are foolish.
If McCain voters agree with his policy proposals, why not just say that? This compulsion to pretend that every utterance from Sarah Palin is some secret stroke of genius is just too funny. By all means, vote for her if she'll enact policies you like, but you'll never convince the rest of us that she's anything more than what we can see with our own eyes.
I don't get Palin's answer. She makes up a quote that Jefferson never said, but worse yet, it doesn't have to do with the question or make any kind of sense. Don't underestimate the wisdom of the people - the people's wisdom is that we should be allowed to express our views (yeah, that's why we have freedom of speech and the free exercise clause) - the wisdom of the people is deeply ingrained in our country, and Thomas Jefferson wanted to protect that! What is she even trying to say? All I get from that answer is that she supports the wisdom of the people.
Uh_Clem, one of my favorite observations is that progressives put more thought into the wittiness of their remarks than into the substance. Thanks for another bit of evidence for that.
You are using a cultural marker as a competence indicator. Arts and Humanities people tend to like to drop the names of their sources, and are proud of how fast they can run them down. Yeah, that's a really useful skill for a chief executive.
tgp1000, when people exaggerate their opponents' position it's usually an indicator that they can't face the argument straight up. No one is saying that Palin is showing secret brilliance; we're discussing what type and amount of legal knowledge is necessary for a president. She fumbles; she gets things partly right; it is uncertain whether she shows some intuitive grasp of principle that would overshadow deficits in specific knowledge.
Against that, the complaint against her seems so often to be "She doesn't sound smooth. Her store of general information seems different from mine. She must be stupid." It is the ease with which her critics come to that conclusion that is being called into question.
I can't stand her voice and expressive style - but I am was a hypercorrect New England Puritan, and have learned over the years that a lot of people I was taught sound stupid turned out to be pretty smart.
Dave N, thanks for the plug. My shtick is to try and find the obvious things that everyone's missing. I only succeed intermittently, which is why I am still an assistant.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand what Palin just said.
She said that the separation of Church and State is supposed to protect the rights of the people. That's one side of a very old debate.
(A debate which Biden tried to take both sides of, BTW -- religion messes up govt., so keep religion out of it, except that religion does not have to stay out of the public square. Thanks Joe, that sure cleared it up.)
These issues are important in a way that chemical engineering is not is because the former are politica, where as the later are not.
Most anyone understands that the right wing wants to inject more religion into our culture and our government. Heck, I just read where there are conservative ministers in Indiana who are telling their congregation how to vote, and want to challenge the IRS's rules against that. They also want the ten commandments in our public buildings, and prayer in our schools, even the public ones. So as a politician, your views on church and state are relevant to the political issues of the day.
Chemical engineering? Well, it might help you understand certain issues, but I don't know how that's a political issue. Thermodynamics? Ditto. now, one can argue that energy is a political issue, but that still doesn't make sense. Energy is a political issue, but the mechanics of wind power are not.
it would be helpful if a president actually knew something about evolution, because now evolution has become a political issue, and I would expect that he or she would know the basics about it so that we don't get them supporting the teaching of creationism in our schools.
Incidentally, it is, in my view, a bit heavy handed for Couric to quote Thomas Jefferson's famour wall of separation as the last word on the topic. Not everyone agreed or agrees with that formulation. While the left has tried to make Jefferson's view as the basic meaning of the religion clauses, that is not a matter of consensus at all.
A better question would be about the role of religion in public life or the meaning of the religion clauses.
That's Biden -- smiling, confident, self-assured...and just plain wrong.
Although they may have an "official" state religion, the UK, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, and Norway are all de facto far more secular than the US.
That's not true either. In many European countries, not only is there a state church, but government also provides direct funding for religious schools of other faiths and demoninations. Levels of religious belief in Europe have declined since WWII, yes, but certainly not because of a wall between church and state -- there is no such wall. And obviously these countries have not been in turmoil due to lack of a constitutionally guaranteed separation.
(Just as, BTW, European countries have all managed to work out abortion laws politically without needing a bogus, constitutionally-guaranteed 'right to abortion' invented and imposed deus ex machina style).
Uh_Clem, it's true that many of the stable countries with established churches are less religious than the US. The First Amendment was not designed to discourage nutty fundies, but rather to promote the toleration of nuts of all stripe. Established churches are frequently milder than their disestablished brethren. The pilgrims who fled a less religious state are part of the mythology supporting the clause, not a critical mitigation of it.
Randy R - I've been blogging and blog commenting long enough to know that constructions like "Most anyone understands" translates as "I have no proof, but everyone I know thinks..." Your example of the preachers mounting the IRS challenge is unsound. They are staging a protest to create test cases so that they may endorse candidates within the four walls of their churches. I disagree with that, but it's not quite the same thing as injecting religion into everything.
I see the distinction you are making between a political issue and a something-else issue, but I don't think it holds up under pressure. Alternative energy vs. drilling vs. nuclear is an important issue for the next president, and guessing doesn't impress me much. Which sucks, because I think all four of them are guessing.
As to evolution, the practical effect of whether one believes we were created 10,000 years ago or whether that's just when we became modern cultural humans (that is about when we domesticated animals, planted crops, built shelters, invented beer) is negligible. It is a cultural issue: does one believe in and understand science all of the time or just most of the time, with some religious exceptions. It feels big because it includes the "are you like me" question. It has to be navigated, not resolved, and I don't know that we have anyone in the country who can.
Governor Palin is wrong because Jefferson's intent when he spoke of a "wall of separation" had more to do with keeping the government's nose out of religion rather than vice-versa.
Senator Biden is wrong because the Establishment Clause, while it was a reaction to European strife, was not intended to remove religion from government, but rather to remove religion from the federal government. The object was to make religion a strictly local — that is, state — matter. The Establishment Clause was the American version of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War and decreed that local princes would decide what faiths their respective subjects would adhere to.
As Bored Lawyer points out, the better question is why we should base our Establishment Clause jurisprudence on a phrase that one guy -- brilliant though he might have been -- once wrote in a letter.
I've never gotten what's so hard about this whole issue. Why would anyone want the government having any role in religious matters at all? Any power exercised by the government is power taken from the people. But the people have no need to give up that authority. They do not need government instruction on when and how and if to pray.
(That is not to say that our Constitution permits an official Church, but to point out that Biden has no clue).
So, I think his point stands.
Look at (Northern) Ireland or Lebanon or Pakistan for good examples of what he's talking about.
Other states collect taxes in support of their Churches.
So, I don't know what you mean that other countries are de facto more secular. If you mean that people are less religious, that may be so (though again, I think Greece is an exception). But that makes the state involvement in religious affairs even more galling and problematic. Yet, there is no strife.
Biden's answer is better, but still not spot on. His appeal to history is correct in that the founding fathers were concerned about the centuries of religious wars from the crusades up through the protestant reformation. DrGrishka refers rightly to stable countries that have an established church (though Italy, Spain, and Sweden do not have established churches any longer). However, their elected governments today are run functionally on a quite secular basis. Theocratic nations do tend towards turmoil.
Are you talking about their culture or their laws?
Also, is the French law, which allows for the banning of headscarves, etc more or less secular than the way we handle these things in the US? And does more secular equate to greater separation between church and state?
If rights are declared to be endowed by our Creator rather than granted by some kind of collective agreement, is one declaration more or less secular than the other?
If the state has a de facto monopoly on education and forbids teachers working for the state from expressing religious views, this would seem to be a positive promotion of the secular by the state, and would in that sense be more secular than a situation in which there were many viable options for receiving religious educations. But does one situation maintain a greater separation between church and state than the other?
Palin on Roe is an excellent example. She knows that an earlier Supreme Court held that there is a right to abortion and that it is currently the law of the land. She knows it’s not specifically in the constitution. She knows that some respected conservative (and not-so-conservative) legal minds have held that Roe is bad law. What else does a president need to know? Anything after that point would involve knowing who to trust more than knowing constitutional law. Even if she can only go in up to her ankles, Biden and Obama can only go in up to their knees, even though they have taught the subject. If anything, people who know more than average are more likely to stupidly think they know it all. (See Biden, 14th Amendment).
I could oversimplify that Bush’s egregious miscalculation of how much he could trust Vlad Putin in the summer of 2001 was his greatest mistake. Much of our later dealing with the UN, Europe, and the Middle East was affected by our over-optimistic hope that Russia would join the company of semi-sane nations and support containment of jihadists rather than exploit that chaos.
I am not arguing that her lack of knowledge is actually an advantage. Of course it’s a disadvantage. But it is nowhere near the disadvantage people are painting it. SNL’s joke about “Can I use a lifeline?” inadvertently hit on this subject. It’s not a quiz show. When we act like it is, it is we who are foolish.
You gave a very smart response. So if you are actually the Assistant Village Idiot, you must live in some village.
Ugh. How about "is that a useful metaphor?"
Well, the name of the newspaper they read is a start.
Or does that fall under "executive privilige"?
You are using a cultural marker as a competence indicator. Arts and Humanities people tend to like to drop the names of their sources, and are proud of how fast they can run them down. Yeah, that's a really useful skill for a chief executive.
tgp1000, when people exaggerate their opponents' position it's usually an indicator that they can't face the argument straight up. No one is saying that Palin is showing secret brilliance; we're discussing what type and amount of legal knowledge is necessary for a president. She fumbles; she gets things partly right; it is uncertain whether she shows some intuitive grasp of principle that would overshadow deficits in specific knowledge.
Against that, the complaint against her seems so often to be "She doesn't sound smooth. Her store of general information seems different from mine. She must be stupid." It is the ease with which her critics come to that conclusion that is being called into question.
I can't stand her voice and expressive style - but I
amwas a hypercorrect New England Puritan, and have learned over the years that a lot of people I was taught sound stupid turned out to be pretty smart.She said that the separation of Church and State is supposed to protect the rights of the people. That's one side of a very old debate.
(A debate which Biden tried to take both sides of, BTW -- religion messes up govt., so keep religion out of it, except that religion does not have to stay out of the public square. Thanks Joe, that sure cleared it up.)
Most anyone understands that the right wing wants to inject more religion into our culture and our government. Heck, I just read where there are conservative ministers in Indiana who are telling their congregation how to vote, and want to challenge the IRS's rules against that. They also want the ten commandments in our public buildings, and prayer in our schools, even the public ones. So as a politician, your views on church and state are relevant to the political issues of the day.
Chemical engineering? Well, it might help you understand certain issues, but I don't know how that's a political issue. Thermodynamics? Ditto. now, one can argue that energy is a political issue, but that still doesn't make sense. Energy is a political issue, but the mechanics of wind power are not.
it would be helpful if a president actually knew something about evolution, because now evolution has become a political issue, and I would expect that he or she would know the basics about it so that we don't get them supporting the teaching of creationism in our schools.
A better question would be about the role of religion in public life or the meaning of the religion clauses.
Although they may have an "official" state religion, the UK, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, and Norway are all de facto far more secular than the US.
That's not true either. In many European countries, not only is there a state church, but government also provides direct funding for religious schools of other faiths and demoninations. Levels of religious belief in Europe have declined since WWII, yes, but certainly not because of a wall between church and state -- there is no such wall. And obviously these countries have not been in turmoil due to lack of a constitutionally guaranteed separation.
(Just as, BTW, European countries have all managed to work out abortion laws politically without needing a bogus, constitutionally-guaranteed 'right to abortion' invented and imposed deus ex machina style).
I see the distinction you are making between a political issue and a something-else issue, but I don't think it holds up under pressure. Alternative energy vs. drilling vs. nuclear is an important issue for the next president, and guessing doesn't impress me much. Which sucks, because I think all four of them are guessing.
As to evolution, the practical effect of whether one believes we were created 10,000 years ago or whether that's just when we became modern cultural humans (that is about when we domesticated animals, planted crops, built shelters, invented beer) is negligible. It is a cultural issue: does one believe in and understand science all of the time or just most of the time, with some religious exceptions. It feels big because it includes the "are you like me" question. It has to be navigated, not resolved, and I don't know that we have anyone in the country who can.
Governor Palin is wrong because Jefferson's intent when he spoke of a "wall of separation" had more to do with keeping the government's nose out of religion rather than vice-versa.
Senator Biden is wrong because the Establishment Clause, while it was a reaction to European strife, was not intended to remove religion from government, but rather to remove religion from the federal government. The object was to make religion a strictly local — that is, state — matter. The Establishment Clause was the American version of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War and decreed that local princes would decide what faiths their respective subjects would adhere to.
As Bored Lawyer points out, the better question is why we should base our Establishment Clause jurisprudence on a phrase that one guy -- brilliant though he might have been -- once wrote in a letter.