MARCI HAMILTON ON THE "AGE OF ENTITLEMENT"

If you haven't read Hamilton's essay on Findlaw, do so; it's here. A few key passages:

For over a decade, religious entities have been lobbying in Congress and the states to obtain the right to trump every imaginable law - without any apparent concern for those that could be hurt by failure to enforce the law.

The discourse in the state legislatures and the Congress has been all about the entitlement of the religious believer. And that same discourse has fueled the Bush Administration's push for federal funding of "faith-based" social services, or more accurately, religious mission. If secular services are receiving federal funds, then religious mission should have a cut of the pie as well, or so the reasoning goes. Again, the Establishment Clause is treated as if it did not exist.

. . .

[W]hen Congress considered the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which gave religious individuals special legal privileges against every law in the country, it failed to focus on whether anyone might be harmed by giving religious individuals such privileges. Similarly, when Congress considered whether to give religious landowners special privileges against zoning laws in the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), it failed to focus on the impact on neighboring landowners.

The harsh language being employed in the Senate with respect to judicial nominations nowadays is probably part of the same trend that Hamilton is describing: folks who express extreme religious views are "entitled" to representation on the federal bench, and any opposition to their ascension deserves the label of bigotry.