Con Job

TO live as a religious believer in the terrestrial city is necessarily to experience divided loyalties. Short of the Kingdom of God, complete justice can never reign, and all temporal allegiances must be provisional. The modern American social order is sufficiently benevolent that we are usually only dimly aware of this tension. For the editors and contributors to a symposium in First Things, an increasingly influential conservative journal on religion and public life, however, recent judicial decisions have put the issue in stark relief.

The November symposium was entitled “The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics.” The symposiasts-Robert Bork, Russell Hittinger, Hadley Arkes, Charles W. Colson, and Robert P. George-condemned recent judicial activism, particularly regarding abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality, as both procedurally undemocratic and substantively immoral or unjust. Hittinger, a professor at the University of Tulsa, argued that these decisions not only “deny protection to the weak and vulnerable” and “systematically remove the legal and political ability of the people to redress the situation,” but raise the invidious principles to the level of “essential features of the constitutional order.” Further, the Supreme Court has set itself against religious believers by nullifying laws allegedly motivated by religion or even the belief that “there is an ethic and a morality which transcend human invention” (Justice Antony Kennedy’s words in Romer v. Evans).

About the Author

Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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TO live as a religious believer in the terrestrial city is necessarily to experience divided loyalties. Short of the Kingdom of God, complete justice can never reign, and all temporal allegiances must be provisional. The modern American social order is sufficiently benevolent that we are usually only dimly aware of this tension. For the editors and contributors to a symposium in First Things, an increasingly influential conservative journal on religion and public life, however, recent judicial decisions have put the issue in stark relief.

The November symposium was entitled “The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics.” The symposiasts-Robert Bork, Russell Hittinger, Hadley Arkes, Charles W. Colson, and Robert P. George-condemned recent judicial activism, particularly regarding abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality, as both procedurally undemocratic and substantively immoral or unjust. Hittinger, a professor at the University of Tulsa, argued that these decisions not only “deny protection to the weak and vulnerable” and “systematically remove the legal and political ability of the people to redress the situation,” but raise the invidious principles to the level of “essential features of the constitutional order.” Further, the Supreme Court has set itself against religious believers by nullifying laws allegedly motivated by religion or even the belief that “there is an ethic and a morality which transcend human invention” (Justice Antony Kennedy’s words in Romer v. Evans).