Re: The President and the Pope

[Rich Schragger]

It seems quite dangerous to a republic for its leaders to encourage and promote the formation of political-religious alliances on controversial public policy questions.  To assert, even obliquely, that to be a good Catholic, one should vote Republican (for example), seems to invite the kind of religiously-identified factionalism that can lead to sectarian strife.  If one takes seriously the Court’s identification of government neutrality (or non-endorsement) as an essential attribute of non-Establishment, then a Presidential appeal to any one religious group or his efforts to create a political alliance with any one religious group seems problematic.  It seems to me that the President has a constitutional obligation not to make statements or engage in conduct that encourages such alliances.

Richard Schragger
University of Virginia School of Law
Charlottesville, VA 22903
tel: (434) 924-3641
fax: (434) 982-2845
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

At 09:53 AM 6/15/2004 -0400, Mark Graber wrote:

Might this be a relevant constitutional point, though not a point of
constitutional law.

The president plays many different roles.  Sometimes more partisan roles
are appropriate.  So there is nothing unpresidential about a post 1896
president urging Americans to elect Republicans to Congress (but see
Tulis, THE RHETORICAL PRESIDENT, suggesting a constitutional norm in the
nineteenth century against such behavior).  Other times, the president
is clearly the representative of the entire nation.  So campaign
rhetoric would have been inappropriate at Reagan's funeral.

Strikes me that when the President confers with the Pope, representative
of the entire nation is the appropriate hat.  Urging the Pope to fight
terrorism is not problemmatic, because that is a non-partisan issue in
the United States.  Urging the Pope to speak out more clear against gay
marriage or capital punishment is more problematic.

Is there anything to this admitted intuition.

MAG
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