Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.

It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages.

There is this fashionable progressive notion that everything is so completely political that the idea we could have some sort of neutral legal process is practically utopian - because we all know that the more money you have, the more rights you can exercise in this society. But I don't think that you deal with income inequality by limiting the First Amendment rights of affluent people. I'd rather see people screw around with the tax code to redistribute wealth a little bit than screw around with the First Amendment.

Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.

I don't see a direct conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of communities, because I don't perceive of communities as having rights in a way that individuals do. Communities certainly have interests, but they don't exactly have rights.

What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.

Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.