Religion should not influence laws and policies enacted by the government.

My opponent concedes that my first point was valid, while somewhat a technicality. I'll therefore not bring it up again until recapping in round 4. First I shall respond to my opponent: My opponent first brought up the the dilemma of allowing people's stances to generate legislation when the stance was influenced by religion. I will bring this up later in my round 2 post, within point II. Then my opponent brought up anti-gay legislation. Anti-gay legislation has no place in America. It's almost necessary to invoke bigotry to justify anti-gay laws whether the reasons for them are religious or not. Bigotry is not something that should be used in lawmaking. At least I don't think so. I'm fairly certain the constitution agrees with me, as well as most people. It's a shame that there are anti-gay laws around. But in the same way that oppression of blacks would be wrong whether there was religion involved or not, it is not because of religion that anti-gay laws are bad. It is because they are hateful and have no legitimate backing - only bigotry. Next my opponent asks how it can be right to subject people to unfair laws who don't agree about said laws. It's not right, but the reason for it being wrong would be the unfair part, not the fact that religion may have been an influence on the lawmakers. That's it for the points my opponent made, so I'll go into my second point. II. Religion affecting valid stances Catholicism teaches that abortion is wrong. The reasoning, in Catholicism, is that from the moment of conception, a person is just as valuable as a developed human. God has at this point already made the person in their entirety. Therefore killing them would be just like killing a fully developed person. This may not make sense from your viewpoint, but consider the following ways to value life (or anything, for that matter): A> For its past B> For what it currently is C> For what it is likely to become (for its entire hypothetical future) D> For its entire hypothetical lifespan (A+B+C or A+C, depending on view) The last two means that I listed both would value a fetus that would eventually become a fully-developed human as just important as an already fully-developed human. These stances do not require any religious views, and are in and of themselves valid viewpoints. It is quite possible, and quite often, that someone would come to these stances without religion. However, you are stating that we should not respect the views when religion is the reason behind them. Consider this: Yesterday morning, you were okay with abortion Yesterday night, I told you some weird ghost story that ended up changing your outlook on the issue. You were then against abortion. Should your hypothetical view matter more than that of a religious person? If so, please tell me why. 'The fact that it's a religion' doesn't matter any more than 'the fact that it's a ghost story' or 'the fact that it's how person X was raised.' The reason for the stance does not matter. If the stance has its own justifiable reasons, it's fair game to use it in politics regardless of what influences there were. So, as long as it's Religion ->which changes/influences-> Valid Stance ->which affects-> Policy or Law It's completely fine for religion to influence policies and laws. Just like it's fine for the ghost story or a person's upbringing to influence policy or law. And since that's getting long enough as it is and we still have two more rounds, I'll let you respond to that and/or bring up more points of your own before posting any more points.