In the name of rationality, it is imperative that we remove all religious people from policy-making ‘ or at least those who can’t help but impose their moral objectives on the rest of us. If die-hard Christians wish to give millions of dollars in private equity to closet sexually repressed homosexuals, they have my blessing. I am not, however, willing to stand back while these crazies legislate morality.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Emerson v. Board of Education (1947) interpreted the first Amendment’s prohibition on laws ‘respecting an establishment of religion’ as intending to erect a ‘wall of separation between church and state that must be kept high and impregnable.’ What happens when the people endowed with the power to make the law hold unequivocal ideological prerogatives? The most obvious effect is the breakdown of separation of church and state.

This is not a theoretical issue, but a reality that is becoming progressively more dangerous. Consider the overarching ‘moral’ issues in public discourse and public policy on the legality of school vouchers, school prayer, school curriculum (teaching creationism vs. evolution), faith based charities, the death penalty, stem cell research, cloning, reproductive technology, same sex unions and civil rights.

Among the recent appalling developments is the U.S. Supreme Court’s shocking decision on two cases challenging the constitutionality of the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, namely, Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Gonzales v. Carhart. For the first time since Roe v. Wade (1973), the SC recognized a prohibition on abortion that did not include an exception for safeguarding a woman’s health.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg points out in her dissent the very important but unspoken fact that, ‘the law saves not a single fetus from destruction, for it targets only a method of performing abortion.’ The aim of the holier than thou pro-lifers was to remand the issue of abortion to state legislatures, as had been the arrangement pre-Roe. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy helped do just that when he stated in the majority opinion, ‘The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman.’

Red states have been anything but shy about their intention to curtail reproductive freedoms. For instance, in 1999, Missouri passed the Infant’s Protection Act, a law which classifies partial birth abortion as infanticide and a Class A felony crime. In 2005, South Dakota legislators incorporated into their informed consent laws a duty that physicians ‘inform’ women seeking abortion that an ‘abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being’ and that the woman was in an existing relationship with an unborn human being.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals had found that the law violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by compelling doctors to state that an unborn fetus was a human being, which was the opinion of the state, not medical or scientific fact. How in the hell did it come to be that empirical facts take a back seat to religious assumptions? Likewise, how has it come to the point where non-existent beings have rights that trump ‘fundamental liberties’ of actual persons and over 30 years of stare decisis (adherence to precedent)?

It is not God who is fighting for the rights of fetuses; it is bureaucratic conservatives using moral rhetoric to reconstruct a patriarchal society. Concern for fetal welfare is not the leading motivational force at work here, for one cannot be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-torture and anti-gun control while still claiming to defend a right to life. Monetary incentive isn’t the driving factor either, since overpopulation is a drain on the economy, public resources and tax money. What does appear to be conspicuously contributing to the anti-abortion movement is the desire to revert back to a society where religion is incestuously wedded with law, and women assume a ‘motherly’ role without career freedom. The critical question here is what are we prepared to do to stop them?

‘ Jennifer Frank is a senior politics, philosophy and law major.