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[hikarugenji]

Justice Scalia is getting a lot of flak for comments he made on 60 minutes to the effect that torture (for interrogation) is not a violation of the 8th amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, because interrogation is not punishment. While I completely disagree with Scalia's attempt to legitimize torture as interrogation, he is actually

Comments

[green_knight]

A country which has 'In God We Trust' on its official currency; where people are sworn in using the religious text of one particular set of religions, and where religious beliefs are replacing science in public school does not seem to have any great degree of seperation of Church and State.

And even so, I am far more alarmed by the lack of separation between legislative and executive, which is one of the pillars of functioning democracy - when your judges answer to your political leaders, you are in big trouble.

[hikarugenji]

I agree that separation of church and state in the US is not absolute, but it's certainly better now than it was in the 19th century (for instance), when explicit religious instruction in public schools was the rule rather than the exception, and laws against things like blasphemy still existed widely.

Did you mean judicial rather than legislative? I think the modern strong link between the judicial and executive branches is partly a result of what I was talking about; the power that the Supreme Court judges have in de facto lawmaking is what makes the President's task of nominating the judges so important.

This is one of those political quandries that I find it hard to label as either flatly good or flatly bad...such is the nature of life, I guess.