The battle over theocracy, or something

The definition of “theocratic aggression” continues to expand, as does the battle against the ever-growing list of things treated as such:

• Robert Reich says that opposition to partial birth abortion and to the recent judicial abolition of distinctions among forms of sexual relations amounts to an attack on religious liberty by evangelicals that the Democrats should explicitly and vigorously contest. In other words, he wants to take public disputes that have no special connection with any particular religion, and define resistance to advances by the Left as a religious war to be prosecuted as such.
• True to one interpretation of the Spirit of Vatican II, some Catholic institutions have taken Reich’s side in his war. At Georgetown University, for example, saying that the Lawrence decision is a “moral 9/11” and calling for “a moral climate whereby homosexuality is rejected” is considered so grossly offensive that it must be forbidden on campus, even in a designated free speech zone. Apparently, to say that traditional views on homosexuality are correct is now thought to constitute theocratic aggression that is beyond legitimate bounds even for Catholics.
• Meanwhile, in France, the President of the Republic says that wearing an Islamic head scarf is an aggressive act, and feminists and socialists agree that making it a crime to cause a mother to miscarry against her will is “a grave mistake” likely to “lead to pro-life, fundamentalist challenges to our right to choose.”

Secularists fighting what they define as theocracy may feel under attack, but they have a few cards—like international human rights law—that they hope to make trumps. Memoranda have recently come to light that lay out explicitly the strategy pro-abortion groups have been pursuing to make abortion an internationally-enforceable right. The strategy involves both reinterpretation of existing treaties, in the manner now familiar in American constitutional law, and creation of “customary international law” through constant repetition of a few themes in international documents. The advantage of the latter is that it could eventually become enforceable without need of treaty authorization.