It’s strictly forbidden to have a religious test for office in the United States, but it is reasonable to ask a person if their moral, social, political, religious or economic convictions will interfere with their ability to do their job. After all, it’s not just religion that can cause a problem. People have non-religious convictions that can interfere with their ability to judge impartially. <\/p>\n
How far can you go down the road of questioning the influence of a person’s religious beliefs without breaking the prohibition on a religious test for office? <\/p>\n
There are some things that would clearly be illegal religious tests, such as rule that a person has to be a Trinitarian, or swear allegiance to the pope, or be baptized in order to hold office. <\/p>\n
But it gets tricky the further you get from such obvious examples. What about requiring that a person hold to a religious point of view — say, that all men are created equal? Can we require that from a candidate? It’s an extraordinarily useful dogma that lies at the heart of our system and laws, but … it really is a religious idea. What if someone didn’t hold to it? Would that disqualify him? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s strictly forbidden to have a religious test for office in the United States, but it is reasonable to ask a person if their moral, social, political, religious or economic convictions will interfere with their ability to do their job. After all, it’s not just religion that can cause a problem. People have non-religious convictions … Continue reading “How far should the questioning go on Judge Barrett’s religious views?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":668,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions\/668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}