Its pretty simple. You have a legal opinion for a religious reason? I'm not listening. Hopefully, no one else will, least of all the lawmakers themselves.

Every religion is guilty of this. Its not as if christianity hasn't worked its way into our legal system, or done its best to influence laws in its favor. We shouldn't legitimize christian legal views any more than we should legitimize Sharia, which is to say not at all.

This is such an obvious truism that I don't even know why I'm bothering to post about it. Force of habit I guess.

JW, I am most certainly NOT stating that England (or America) is a "Christian nation," as in one which formally sides with Christianity in any kind of way. Nor should it be.

And I would state that very often that insertion of Christianity has gone too far.

But we would be foolish to believe that our basic sense of ethics, and the laws which we have made to reflect that, does not come from a Christian ethic and history, and has been developed entirely outside of religion. That's just silly. The West's most basic ethical concepts come from the Judeo-Christian ethic, whether we like or not. Christianity is shot through our most basic, secular concepts of right and wrong. That includes most adamant atheists and anti-Christians.

So the question really is, "Now that we've settled a lot of things and have been able to apply a generally 'Christian' point of view to a secular system of laws, do we want to re-do the whole thing to accomodate an entirely separate set of values? And particularly Muslim ones?"

The answer should be no. Why? Because that does not forward liberty or social cohesion, but in fact does the exact opposite.