This is the third article of our 2012 online journal. The full article is available here. Below is a preview by our editorial staff.
Due to the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the ministerial exception in Hosanna Tabor v. EEOC, Ian Bartrum revisits the controversial doctrine and proposes the constitutional limits of its practice. Recognizing the Lockean conviction that church and state exist within two separate spheres, Bartrum maintains that these spheres still overlap and that religious sovereignty cannot be absolute. The question then follows is what is the state's role, or how is the state to govern, in such an overlapping space? Drawing from Thomas Kuhn's observations about the shared grounds on which scientists justify their choices between incommensurable, competing theoretical paradigms, Bartrum answers that "we can and do make decisions about the scope of religious sovereignty" in these overlapping spaces "by balancing commensurable constitutional purposes against one another in making what Kuhn called 'value judgments.'" He ultimately concludes that "[i]n the case of the ministerial exception, it is my constitutional value judgment that racial discrimination both exceeds the limits of independent religious sovereignty, and justifies state intervention in church governance."
Due to the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the ministerial exception in Hosanna Tabor v. EEOC, Ian Bartrum revisits the controversial doctrine and proposes the constitutional limits of its practice. Recognizing the Lockean conviction that church and state exist within two separate spheres, Bartrum maintains that these spheres still overlap and that religious sovereignty cannot be absolute. The question then follows is what is the state's role, or how is the state to govern, in such an overlapping space? Drawing from Thomas Kuhn's observations about the shared grounds on which scientists justify their choices between incommensurable, competing theoretical paradigms, Bartrum answers that "we can and do make decisions about the scope of religious sovereignty" in these overlapping spaces "by balancing commensurable constitutional purposes against one another in making what Kuhn called 'value judgments.'" He ultimately concludes that "[i]n the case of the ministerial exception, it is my constitutional value judgment that racial discrimination both exceeds the limits of independent religious sovereignty, and justifies state intervention in church governance."
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