Volokh

Sets up straw man... Tears it down. Excellent work.

I really like Eugene Volokh; as a scholar, I find him very rigorous and intellectually engaging. But this post is really quite silly. Let's break it down:

Imposing One's Religious Dogma on the Legal System:
I keep hearing evangelical Christian leaders criticized for "trying to impose their religious dogma on the legal system," for instance by trying to change the law to ban abortion, or by trying to keep the law from allowing gay marriage. I've blogged about this before, but I think it's worth mentioning again.

I like to ask these critics: What do you think about the abolitionist movement of the 1800s? As I understand it, many -- perhaps most or nearly all -- of its members were deeply religious people, who were trying to impose their religious dogma of liberty on the legal system that at the time legally protected slavery.

Or what do you think about the civil rights movement? The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, was one of its main leaders, and he supported and defended civil rights legislation as a matter of God's will, often in overtly religious terms. He too tried to impose his religious dogma on the legal system, which at the time allowed private discrimination, and in practice allowed governmental discrimination as well.

The easiest way to make your ideological or philosophical opponents look silly is to mischaracterize or caricature their arguments. It's so much easier to win an argument when you are arguing both sides. And Volokh does just that.

Intelligent people who oppose the policies advocated by the Christian right don't oppose them because they arise from religious convictions. They oppose them as social policy. Criticizing the "Christian right" is not a criticism of religion, or political beliefs arising from religion, or the right to lobby for legal changes that conform to religious views. Rather, it is simply shorthand for opposition to the policies advocated by Evangeligal Christian leaders.

Volokh shouldn't play so naive. Generally, when the right attacks "liberals" (attack dogs such as Ann Coulter excepted), it is understood that it is the policies advocated by liberals that are the real target of the criticism, not the moral or philosophical beliefs of those who support such policies. The same understanding should be obvious in the case of criticism of the Christian right.
In any case, Volokh eventually comes to his grand, conciliatory and thoroughly milquetoast conclusion:

So people should certainly criticize the proposals of the Religious Right (or Religious Left or Secular Right or Secular Left) that they think are wrong on the merits. But they would be wrong to conclude that the proposals are illegitimate simply on the grounds that the proposals rest on religious dogma. Religious people are no less and no more entitled than secular people to enact laws based on their belief systems.

Has anyone seriously argued that religious people are less entitled than secular people to enact laws based on their belief systems? Has anyone said that the policies supported by the Christian right are "illegitimiate simply on the grounds that the proposals rest on religious dogma?" Of course not. Because that would be ridiculous. Rather, opponents of the religious right, when they criticize, are criticizing the policies they espouse and advocate, just as the religious right argues against and labels its opponents in its own shorthand.

But it sure makes the Christian right look good, setting their homophobic, anti-choice agenda side by side with the abolitionist movement, and Martin Luther King and conscientious objectors. And perhaps that was the point Volokh really wanted to make. Or then again, perhaps he was simply bloviating.