A Quote by Wendy Kaminer

Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.

Wendy Kaminer

Quote Topics

Accused Deny Discourse Ideals Often Public Public Discourse Purge Religious Simply Sponsorship Them Trying Want

Quote Author

Wendy Kaminer
American - Lawyer
Born: December 28, 1949

Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.

Dinesh D'Souza

The First Amendment is now being used by the secularists of our day as a cattle prod to herd conservative religious people out of the public life of the nation and into, as others have put it, a religious ghetto.

Pat Swindall

A willingness by politicians to say what they think the public want to hear, and a willingness by large parts of the public to believe what they are told by populist politicians, has led to a deterioration in our public discourse.

David Gauke

And how can we ever again succeed in educating children to become moral men and women if, in America's public schools, we consciously deny them all religious instruction, and deny them access to that primary source of morality, God's own word. The Bible is the one book from which they are expressly not allowed to be taught.

Pat Buchanan

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

Robert Reich

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.

Stephen L. Carter

Unfortunately, you're helpless when people interpret your work wrongly. There are simply people who can't or won't understand or accept what you're trying to do. When you take the risk of expressing yourself in public, you have to open yourself to that possibility.

Michael Haneke

When people run a business and open their door to the public, they must serve the public. That doesn't mean they can't say whatever they want to say. It doesn't mean they can't believe whatever they want to believe. Those are protected also. But businesses must serve the public. And that's a principle that we fought for in this country over many, many decades, when some were invoking religious freedom as an excuse to deny people on the basis of their race, on the basis of their religion, on the basis of sex and on the basis now of sexual orientation. Let's not confuse one thing with the other.

Chris Christie

I'm opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.

Kamala Harris

We are the raison d'être of the entire system. We are also the employers of those in public office and in the public service. Why should we accept from them a discourse which suggests contempt for us and for the democratic system?

John Ralston Saul

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

Barack Obama

I realize that my opinion is my opinion, not everybody has to believe it and I never tried to shove anything down anyone's throat, but I was willing to take that to the trenches if you know what I mean. I took that opinion to the wall, often in public, often had to... I often had to fight in public with the very same people who I was trying to convince to play my records!

Bernie Finkelstein

So Putin is not the dictator that he's often accused of being. He has to be very sensitive to public opinion.

Fiona Hill

Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.