Should a Conscientious Legislator Vote Based on Purely Religious Motivation?
Of course, a law can be constitutional but still be a bad law, and a conscientious legislator might want to hold himself to a higher standard than the constitutional minimum. Suppose, for example, that a legislator favors a law banning physician-assisted suicide for no other reason than that she believes suicide to be a sin. Can she in good conscience vote for the law for this purely religious reason, knowing that the courts will uphold the law by attributing to it some quite distinct secular purpose for example, to avoid a practice that could undermine medical ethics, or to avoid the risk that the sick and elderly will be coerced into suicide? Moreover, what if the legislator happens to think that legal physician-assisted suicide would not undermine medical ethics or lead to coercion and thus that the law would not serve the secular purposes that would be ascribed to it? Can she still use these secular justifications as cover for her religiously-based vote? Finally, what if the legisl
