Resolved:  That the constitutional right of freedom of religion has wrongly evolved into freedom from religion.

The NCFL Grand Public Forum topic is poorly worded: the First Amendment to the Constitution has from the start always provided people both with freedom of religion and freedom from religion.  The “Free Exercise Clause” prohibits Congress from “abridging the free exercise” of religion, in other words it guarantees a right to “freedom of religion,” but the “Establishment Clause” has always provided that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” in other words it guarantee everyone freedom from religion.  With the Fourteenth Amendment effectively extending the scope of the First Amendment to States and local government, all levels of government from municipal to federal have had to struggle with the question of how not to offend either of these two clauses.  The list of Supreme Court cases that have focused on these two clauses is long and likely to continue to grow, almost all of them instructive in one way or another.  Perhaps the framers of this topic though they were being pithy in juxtaposing “freedom of religion” from “freedom from religion,” but in fact these two concepts have stood side by side in the Constitution since it was ratified along with Bill of Rights.

What I suppose the framers are asking is whether the United States Supreme Court, the final arbiter of conflicts between the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses, has gone too far in favoring the Establishment Clause over the Free Exercise Clause to the point where the latter is under threat.  Though there are likely other ways to interpret this topic, this is the easiest and probably most rewarding.  My suggestion for Public Forum debaters is to look through the Court’s most recent decisions and, if on the pro side, find some where you feel you can argue the Court has gone too far, in principle upholding the Establishment Clause, thus unjustly restricting people’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom to exercise their religion.  On the con, you will need to argue in favor of a strict separation of church and state.

Given that this is the National Catholic Forensic League’s Grant Tournament, I would suggest starting my research by analyzing Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002).  Unfortunately for the Pro, this was a case in which the Court ruled that the providing vouchers to students to attend parochial schools did not in fact violate the Establishment Clause.  However, in the opinions written in this case, arguments for the Pro and Con are presented quite well.

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Resolved: When in conflict, the preservation of minority cultural values ought to be valued above the preservation of a unified national culture.

This is the topic for the Catholic Forensic League Grande Tournament, which will take place over Memorial Day weekend, the same weekend Anca and I are getting married in Romania, so I won’t be there to cheer the Hunter Debaters on, but I will be posting regularly on my thoughts for this topic. I’m going to have to tag these topics so the posts are easy to find. Comments and suggestions on how to do that will be greatly appreciated.

This is going to be tough topic to debate since it’s very poorly worded. What are “minority cultural values” and weigh aren’t they being weighed against “majority” or “national” cultural values? And what are “culture values” anyway? Do they mean the things that the culture values? Are there any modern nations with a “unified national culture”? It is hard to understand exactly what it would mean to negate this topic.

The topic committee was likely trying to rehash the stale debate over whether it would be preferable for minority groups to integrate or assimilate into the dominant cultures of the society in which they live. At basic question is whether it would be preferable that minority groups retain a separate cultural identity than that shared by the majority of their compatriots. While it would be wrong to say that a consensus has been reached on this issue, most Western democracies seem to agree at this point that minority communities should be encouraged to preserve their identity so long as these are consistent with the core tenets of liberal democracy. So, for instance, a minority might be given space to practice their religion, they would not be permitted to practice ritual human sacrifice if that happened to be a part of their religious tradition. Debate continues to take place on where to do the line between what practices merit mutual understand and respect or, at the very least, tolerance, and which do not, but by and large there seems to be a respect for difference at this point.

This is not to say that there are not still those who nativists who promote assimilation, but I doubt that a hard line defense of assimilation will sway many judges in these debates.

The interesting examples here are all real world examples: should members of the Church of Latter Day Saints have been permitted to practice polygamy; should the state support bi-lingual education for minority children; should Muslim women be prevented from wear headscarves in schools; should native American tribes be able allowed you to use peyote; etc.

Some people I’d suggest reading on this topic are: Will Kymlicka, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Charles Taylor.