United Press International (UPI) is reporting that Turkey is dangerously close to another military coup.
The Turkish military ardently defends the country's secular constitution. Three times in the last 35 years the military has overthrown democratically elected governments for being too religious.
The two leading candidates for the presidency of Turkey are moderate Islamists who believe in democracy. The military and others say they are worried that such leaders will work to repeal the secular principles of the country's constitution.
The problems in Turkey serve to demonstrate the wisdom of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment to our constitution has two clauses. One separates the government from religion. The second secures the free exercise of religion. Turkey seems to have the first clause without the second.
Turkish secularists are offended that the wife of one of the presidential candidates wears a headscarf as a symbol of her faith. By way of contrast, the second clause of the U.S. Constitution assures that candidates for political office, as well as their wives, are free to wear symbols of their personal faith. In fact, many of them frequently campaign by wearing their faith prominently on their sleeves.
The U.S. Constution also prohibits forcing people to wear symbols of faith and/or treating those of other faiths or of no faith as second class citizens. If that is what the Turkish military is worried about, they need to address the disease instead of the symptoms.
1 comment:
Yeah, it's hard to beat the balance of the U.S. "benevolent neutrality." India has government-religion separation, but politicians regularly whip up differing faiths against each other. France banned headscarves from the public schools, seeing it as a threat to their form of church-state separation. On the other hand, Britain, Canada, and Australia, while having large degrees of religious liberty (in some ways more than we do), think nothing of funding religious education in public schools.
I don't see why our churches don't appreciate our system more. Nothing's perfect, but on this topic, the Framers came pretty darn close, in my view.
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