From The New York Times’ editorial, The Court’s Blow to Democracy, :

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

The classical justification of the separation of church and state doctrine, the protection of the religious freedom, is not so strong as it was in the past,  it is due to the fact that many churches understand that the de jure official secularism not as a neutral point of view, but as an independent religious and moral point of view radically opposed to the tradition and faith of common people. Some Christian leaders even use the term “secularism” as a synonyms of “atheism”.

Just read this quote of then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict:

Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality which opens up areas of freedom for everyone. It is beginning to turn into an ideology that imposes itself through politics and leaves no public space for the Catholic and Christian vision, which thus risks becoming something purely private and essentially mutilated. We must defend religious freedom against the imposition of an ideology that presents itself as the only voice of rationality.

I share the worry about the decline of the doctrine. But this comment is not another “look how disrespectful of the diversity this religious people are”. I prefer to examine if there is something  thru within this attack of secularism.

1. Does the Pope Benedict is correct when say that “secularism is no longer that element of neutrality” or it’s just a excuse to penetrate to the state power and return to the old time of official religious views?
2. And…

• …if he is correct, can we reconstruct the classical “element of neutrality” in a way that satisfy a great percent of the population?

• …or if it’s just a excuse to penetrate to the state power and return to the old time of official religious views, how does the civil and human rights activists should confront this efforts without seems to confirm the accusations of being an opposed belief to their spiritual faith?

Many questions and few answer for the time being.

May be most people think about lawyers as cold and mechanical readers of legal texts, or as boring corporate contract writers. I prefer to see jurists as modern philosophers. It’s thru that lawyers are not complete free thinkers because depend on law for their conclusions, but even with this parameter, there is a lot of space for reflections and debates, and even we can argue that the situation very similar to traditional philosophers: the difference is that the firsts are more free to chose the foundations of their thinking while lawyers have more imposed foundations (statutes, precedents, constitutions, etc.). But, again,  there is a lot of space to think.

PopJuris USA is a blog about american law. of PopJuris.com.It is more an experiment than a formal project due to the fact that the most contents of the website PopJuris.com were written in Spanish, and are about Puerto Rican and other hispanic jurisdiction law.

So here is a basic instructions: PopJuris USA has a blog (the one that you are reading) and a library, that is a place in which we are going to publish non periodic juridical content relevant to non juridical readers.

Thanks.