Not MY America

The more I think about William Barr's speech at the Notre Dame law school, the more concerned-distressed--and, to be honest, frightened I become.

Here's what he had to say:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-remarks-law-school-and-de-nicola-center-ethics

Here are some responses:

"William Barr’s Wild Misreading of the First Amendment"

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/william-barrs-wild-misreading-of-the-first-amendment

"Notre Dame had a right to host Barr — but his talk was ridiculously stupid"

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/notre-dame-had-right-host-barr-his-talk-was-ridiculously-stupid

It's bad enough to think that morality and decent human behavior are possible only in a religious environment, but it's even worse to select a single religious tradition--which is, for all his invocation of the "Judeo-Christion tradition"--an extremely conservative, even authoritarian, strain of Roman Catholicism. 

In his speech, he not only ignores the value of any other religious traditions*, he states that it is not possible to have a moral society without a very narrow definition of morality based on one of those traditions.  He asserts that the growth in the number of people who do not accept that one faith tradition is the *the cause* of what he sees as the collapse of public (and private, too, I think) morality in the US. 

I could--but won't--make the opposite argument.  That religious beliefs have been a major cause, not only in Europe and America, of the slaughter of millions.  Christians slaughtering Christians (the Cathars, anyone?).  The persecution, serially, if Protestants and then Catholics in England?  The 30-Years' War in Europe?).  Christians in the U.S. slaughtering the people who were here before the European invasion?  The forced conversions of their children even in the 20th century?  (Well, OK, I did sort of make the opposite argument.)

And it scares me that the Attorney General of the United States, speaking not as a private citizen, but as the chief legal official in the US, makes this argument, that he places the blame in what he claims is great moral decline, on people like me, who profess no religious beliefs, but (to the best of out ability) try to live moral lives. 

Robert Heinlein wrote a series of SF novels and stories (in the 1950s) based on a United States that had become a theocracy.  As a kid, those stories struck me as all too plausible.  And they still do.  I do not wan a country--and I do not think the Founding Fathers would wand a country, i--which a person's right to believe, or not believe, in one, or any, on no religious tradition, has been taken away. 

Barr seems to be a theocrat.  But if I have anything to say about it--not in this country.

* Hindu, B'hai, Jehovah's Witnesses, Islamic, Mormon, the various religions of the original Americans, Hinduism, Bhuddaism (not actually a religion, but a set of moral teachings), and scores of others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States, is you're curious).  And that's not to mention the non-theistic moral traditions.]