Say you want to resurrect the Equal Rights Amendment. Say I'm immune to arguments that it's simply the right thing to do. (I'm not.) To gain my support, you might evoke my wife, daughter and mother -- a lot of the people closest to me are girls or women. But you don't care about the particular people closest to me, in other than very abstract terms. You're appealing to something important to me to get me to agree with something important to you.

You might argue that ensuring equal rights between the sexes will boost the economy and commerce in ways that benefit me. Same thing. You often -- in fact, almost always, in a country of more than 260 million people -- have to stray from the argument that would win or has won you over and take another tack with me. This is true of any opinion or proposal you want me to support.

Dorf as much as says so:

Those who oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds understand that in trying to persuade their fellow citizens to maintain bans on the practice, they cannot simply point to church teachings. Tolerance and respect often require mounting secular arguments because one understands that one's religious principles and tenets are not shared by all.

And the same is true for liberal causes supported by persons of religious faith. It may be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, but that is not a sufficient ground for progressive taxation to aid the poor.

This is exactly right, but doesn't tend to prove religious reasons for supporting a law or policy "must" be "potentially suspect" (any more than any other reason), or that there must be a separation between church and politics (what a chilling phrase!). In fact, it tends to prove the opposite: the free exchange of ideas works. If you can't convince the less religious, or those who don't share your particular religious beliefs, to support the law or policy you support because of your faith, the law or policy will fail. So, the system works.

Dorf says that arguments against "public reason," "the requirement that laws be defensible in secular terms," are "dangerous":

In recent years, some religious persons and groups have argued that the demands of public reason are unfair. They argue this way: Secularists who favor a policy are permitted to argue for that policy based on the grounds they deem most persuasive. So why should persons who hold pervasively religious world views be denied the same opportunity?

There is undoubtedly something right about this objection. Efforts to keep the public sphere free of religious arguments do indeed disadvantage those who hold pervasively religious views.

But what the objection overlooks is the reason we as a society have for trying to prevent public policy debates from becoming competitions between different religious sects. As the framers of our Constitution and Bill of Rights well knew, history teaches that societies in which political divisions track religious ones frequently descend into bloodletting. And sadly, our own era provides no shortage of further examples.

This is preposterous, and naive, unless it's bigoted -- let's assume it's naive. We are a pluralistic society; we do outlaw murder and theft, favor environmental protection (to varying degrees) and racial equality, and some form of distributive justice. We continue to be polarized by issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, but have yet to be caught up in a cataclysmic holy war.

The theory of enlightened self interest means that individuals, each acting for their own benefit, in a society that welcomes and encourages every viewpoint, ethnicity, background, experience, type, will in the aggregate do what's best for everybody. To warn against allowing people with religious views to act on them in their policy discussion, support for their lawmakers, even opinion formation, is alarming.

Take as an example people who approach issues from the standpoint that ecology and the environment take precedence over commerce and markets. I can make a fairly convincing argument that taken to the extreme -- that is, with no competing viewpoints in the arena of political discussion -- this approach would devastate the nation's economy, plunging millions into poverty and death, and would do irreparable harm to the quality of life in America.

I suppose I have two options. I can support the environmentalists' viewpoint when it makes sense to me on other bases that are important to me, oppose it when it doesn't, and try to persuade others to join with me, elect like-minded legislators, fail to re-elect ones that take things too far, and so on.

Or I can argue their viewpoints are "dangerous," their involvement in political discourse "suspect," and warn they might have to be banned.

Which is more appropriate? Which do you suppose Prof. Dorf thinks is more appropriate?

Substitute any interest group for environmentalists in this example. Name one you conclude we should "suspect" and be wary of because it's too "dangerous" to be allowed full reign in our political system.

Of course, I do not suggest that the injection of religious arguments into American politics by evangelicals or others will plunge us immediately into a religious civil war. But the abundant lessons of the past and present do provide reasons to be wary of even the first step down that path.

Not "immediately"? That's a relief.

This is an alarming article, moreso because I strongly suspect there will be, in the main, little disagreement with it. We have the separation of church and state clause in the constitution, after all. (Don't we? Was sure I saw it somewhere.)

When professors of law start warning of the consequences of people supporting policies and measures based on what's important to them, democracy is in danger of eroding. It's not for them or anyone else but the marketplace of ideas in the aggregate to decide which viewpoints are "dangerous" if left unchecked -- and no viewpoint is left unchecked in America, anyway.

At least, not yet.