More Begging

Via Daily Kos, Digby refers, in passing, to the ‘Constitution Restoration Act of 2005‘, currently supported by a nut-cluster of the right.

Here’s Digby’s quotation of the first clause, with her emphasis intact:

The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 – Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

There are any number of reasons to find such a proposal nauseating – it’s essentially an end run (yes, I can do American football metaphors now, thangyou, thangyou) around the constitutional separation of church and state. But, caring somewhat more for violations of plain simple logic than I do for wrangling over the meaning of any one country’s user manual, I find that Digby didn’t emphasise the word that strikes me as the most important one in the clause. It’s this: acknowledgement.

Separation of church and state is a matter of process, and a country is quite entitled to decide one way or the other. I’d rather see them as separate, and I’d certainly prefer to see them kept separate when separation is constitutional, thanks very much, but what we have here is something quite different. We’re back to begging the question, of course. Acknowledging ‘God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government’ does more than simply squish church and state together. It begs the question of the existence of a god. One cannot acknowledge something unless its existence as fact is pretty well uncontroversial. Says Chambers:

acknowledge verb (acknowledged, acknowledging) 1. to admit or accept the truth of (a fact or situation).

There are two parts to acknowlegement. There’s some thing which is true; and there’s an attitude of acceptance being taken towards that thing which is true. Things would be very different if the clause read something like:

The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 – Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s belief in God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

Belief entails nothing about the truth of that which is believed. Acknowledgement, on the other hand, entails, or at least implies with all the force that natural language can muster short of actually being a formal logic, the truth of that which is acknowledged. The ‘Constitution Restoration Act of 2005’ as written, would therefore do far more than prohibit enforcement of the separation of church and state in the US at the Federal level – though that would be plenty. It would finesse into Federal law an axiomatic assumption of the existence of a god, who is ‘the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government’. It’s the god axiom again.