When courts and lawmakers can drive morally informed voices from the public square, it’s not just religious believers whose rights are eroded.

It should concern everyone, as Acton’s Kevin Schmiesing explains in this commentary.

Last week, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down a state law prohibiting homosexual men and women from marrying same-sex partners. The decision depended on the court’s finding that there was no “rational basis” for Iowa’s statute. More specifically, the Court determined that opposition to same-sex marriage was all (or mostly) motivated by “religion.” By endorsing the law, the Court concluded, it would be endorsing religion, which is forbidden by the First Amendment.

Legal scholar Matthew Franck summarizes the implication of the court’s argument well: “if a moral argument finds support in any religious commitment, then the promulgation of that argument in law is a violation of the principle of religious disestablishment.” More to the point, Franck observes, this approach to First Amendment jurisprudence is “logically fallacious, historically illiterate, and politically brutish.”

The latter, because it strong-arms religious people from any arena of influence in the formation of law or public policy. Which gets to why it should concern everyone.

As the Iowa case demonstrates, any religious view will be suspect, so long as it grates the sensibilities of whomever the political elite happen to be at the time. Even the views of non-religious people can be ostracized in this way…

It should be obvious that this is no way of building a pluralistic society that is free and peaceful. The American Founders knew better when they fashioned an amendment forbidding the national government from establishing a church, guaranteeing all people the right to practice their faith, and leaving the rest to local custom and personal freedom.

What is not being upheld in these cases is the ‘free exercise’ provision of the Establishment Clause.

Recognizing the influence of religion, tyrants have always begun their quest for absolute power by coopting religious leaders. Where they have failed in that enterprise, would-be despots have neutralized them by undermining their authority or doing away with troublesome ministers altogether. History’s tyrants recognized the progression that some of us have forgotten: Where people are free to act according their conscience, they will demand the right to determine their political destiny.