Religious justifications regarding a proposed national/state law should be disregarded.

Religious justifications regarding proposed legislation, whether federal/state/local, is entirely irrelevant to such a situation and should be completely disregarded in the decision making process. Let me start off with some information from Creighton University regarding a Yale law professor by the name of Stephen Carter and his book, "The Culture of Disbelief." "His argument in a nutshell is that religion has no privileged place in debates about public policy, but neither should it be uniquely disadvantaged. Yet this is precisely what is happening in American culture today, argues Carter. Liberal democracy has no place for religion in politics, for it envisions religion as a private, personal matter, "like building model airplanes, just another hobby: something quiet, something private, something trivial--and not really a fit activity for intelligent, public-spirited adults." The article continues, "After making the case for the important role religion should play in political discourse, Carter looks at the way in which American politics often marginalizes religion by demanding that public debates be limited to arguments that all persons--despite their differing backgrounds and religious beliefs--can accept. The result is to require religious people to bracket their deepest values when they enter the public arena. Religious believers, says Carter, must "remake themselves" before they are allowed to participate in public policy debates." [http://moses.creighton.edu...] Let's look at this critically. Essentially, what Stephen Carter is trying to say is that religion should have no place in the public arena because there are many different views and religions. Some differ slightly. Others differ dramatically. If a law were to be passed on the basis of a religious justification, that justification would really only matter to the people that believed in that religion and would be forcing other people, people who do not believe in the same ideologies, to abide by that certain religion's morals/beliefs. Thus, becomes a mild form of oppression. Mild, yes, but still oppression. Religion has been a hindrance to society's progression all along. One needs not look further than the Dark Ages or the Crusades. Many great minds were punished, therefore their intelligence would not be recognized until later, because they deviated from the Church's beliefs. Laws are a part of societal progression and when religious issues are debated regarding a law in the public arena, it becomes a nuisance to others because their beliefs are different and it becomes a type of lag that slows down the process of progress. I leave you with an abstract of a Yale student's public law research paper to maybe clear up any miscommunication. "This paper intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called "religious reasons" ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and modes of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of human and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political communities deliberate. Religious arguments are of many different kinds, are offered to others in a variety of ways, and the spheres of life about which communities deliberate pose distinct moral question. Turning back to the public reason debate, I argue then that liberals ought to be concerned only about the invocation of a certain subset of religious reasons only in a certain subset of areas of human activity, but also that inclusivist arguments on behalf of religious contributions to public deliberation both fail to explain the moral appeal of religious arguments and fail to justify the use of religious arguments in all areas of public deliberation." [http://papers.ssrn.com...] (Really interesting paper. I encourage everyone to read it.)