US: Some of US history's landmark developments owe a debt to the continuous eruption of religious or moral "crusades", a leading US judge, John T Noonan, maintains.
Speaking last night on "the letter of religious liberty and its spirit" to the NUI Galway faculty of law, Judge Noonan said the abolition of slavery would not have occurred without "the exercise of religious freedom", and Martin Luther King had also defended the use of religion in achieving his aims.
He described the issue of abortion in the US as a "crusade in progress" which had dominated every presidential election since the 1973 Roe v Wade judgment. Whereas the proponents of the Roe v Wade ruling tried to "put an end to a serious national controversy" by establishing that most laws against abortion violate a constitutional right to privacy , the ruling ignited a movement "dedicated to its overthrow", he said.
A prolific legal author and Roman Catholic scholar, he is best known for his 1995 ruling upholding the ban on assisted suicide and is a noted opponent of both capital punishment and abortion.