Eugene Volokh and Instapundit profess to be upset by Garrison Keillor's comments:
I’m trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to born-again Christians,” Keillor smirked. “I feel if your citizenship is in Heaven—like a born again Christian’s is—you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If born again Christians are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?
The thing is that being a born-again Christian is a choice, it's an opinion, it's perfectly legitimate to criticize it and mock it if that's what you want to do. If someone chooses to believe in a particular creed that's information on what kind of person they are.
Being Canadian on the other hand, is sometimes a choice--if you migrated there and took up citizenship--and sometimes an immutable fact of birth.
The worst you could say about Keillor's comment is that he equated a choice (religion) with an accident of birth (nationality), and implied that the fate of being born Canadian was somehow akin to the poor choice of camp religion. It's the Canadians that should be outraged, not the Christians.
Posted by robe0419 at November 15, 2004 11:52 PM