An article from the Fall 2007 symposium issue of the West Virginia Law Review, Volume 110, on “The Religion Clauses in the 21st Century.” The symposium was convened by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and the West Virginia University College of Law on October April 12 and 13, 2007.

As part of the series of papers from the symposium panel “Religion and Politics,” Vivian E. Hamilton, now Associate Professor of Law at College of William and Mary, Marshall-Wythe School of Law, wrote “Religious v. Secular Ideologies and Sex Education: A Response to Professors Cahn and Carbone.” In the article, “Vivian Hamilton emphasizes the ways in which [Professors Cahn and Carbone] seem to embrace a fairly robust version of the ideal of public reason and questions whether that commitment can be fully justified and defended. While she shares Cahn’s and Carbone’s reservations about abstinence-only sex education, she suggests that there may be no practical alternative to allowing state experimentation with different approaches and hoping that an appreciation of policy consequences will ultimately prove more influential than religious ideology.” - From Introduction by William P. Marshall, Vivian E. Hamilton and John E. Taylor.