Point of Inquiry

Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is one of the country's foremost appellate lawyers and a distinguished defender of civil liberties. More than a million people have heard him lecture around the world. His books include the New York Times bestsellers The Case for Israel and Chutzpah as well as Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights, The Vanishing American Jew, Why Terrorism Works, and America on Trial. He has been profiled and interviewed widely in the media and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Free Inquiry, and many other newspapers and periodicals. His latest book is Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence.

In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Dershowitz explores the question of whether America is a Christian nation, the use of the mention of God in the Declaration of Independence by the religious right to advance their aims, whether marriage and gay rights is a church-state separation issue, and separation of religion and state issues in the nation of Israel. He also discusses the secular roots of America's founding, and the secular roots of Zionism, addresses his long-time support of Israel as a secularist, and discusses the current political condition of the religious right in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Also in this episode, Justin Trottier, executive director of CFI Ontario, discusses church-state separation issues in Ontario's public school system.