Peter Berger on "militant secularism," the CLS case, and flypaper

Peter Berger has a nice post, here, commenting on the tendency of lawyers and bureaucrats to "think in highly abstract categories," the misguided expansion and application of "nondiscrimination" rules to student groups, and flypaper reports.  A bit:

I have previously written about a militant secularism having become a noisy presence in America. I have called it (only half tongue-in-cheek) Kemalist—after Kemal Ataturk’s view of religion as a backward superstition to keep out of public space.  It is the ideology of a quite small group that would not get anywhere through the democratic process and can only work through the courts, the least democratic branch of government. I can’t see Justice Ginsburg as a secularist ideologue. More likely, she reflects the views of church/state relations that have come to be taken for granted in the liberal subculture.

The legal mind, and the bureaucratic mind which is its lowbrow offspring, likes to squeeze the immense vitality of human life into abstract categories. Once these categories have been established, they must be imposed on everyone. I recall an episode I came across during my stint in the US Army. I knew a company clerk in Fort Benning, Georgia, where I spent most of my time in the military. He was enormously bored on his job. This was just before the two revolutions which transformed the American South: desegregation and air-conditioning (making the region more humane, more tolerable in the summer, and because of these two developments more dynamic economically). My acquaintance spent his days sitting at his desk, with little to do, sweating and swatting away the flies. He acquired a flypaper, which did indeed attract and kill a good many flies. He counted the number of flies caught on the flypaper and began to send weekly reports with this information to base headquarters. After three weeks of this exercise every unit in Fort Benning received a memorandum from headquarters, demanding to know why no flypaper reports had been submitted.

Heh.