*Jury room.

Slate discusses the Democratic Party’s new approach to abortion.

(Via BNR.)

The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the state’s business to secure religious uniformity within its polity — or at least to exclude Dissenters from important rights — was crucial to the formation of the early modern state. By contrast, the secular Enlightenment theory that the political community consists of an abstract collection of equal citizens was propounded as a criticism of the religious inequality characterizing the absolutist state. The most famous document embodying that theory was the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” The theory was critized almost from the moment it was first stated — notably by Burke for the license it gave destructive passiosns, and by Marx for disguising bourgeois self-interest. However, the decisive moments that helped to break the alliance of church and state seem to have been religious rather than secular — Tractarianism in England and Ultramontanism in France and Europe generally. The arguments they deployed most effectively were strictly theological and were aimed at securing freedom of Christ’s church from the constraints of an earthly power. An important consequence of abandoning the total union of church and state was the eventual emergence of “minority rights” as a central theme of national politics. Members of minorities became at once equal citizens, members of the body politic (”the people as a whole”), and, as a minor body, unequal to the majority, requiring special protection.

–Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press, 2003.