Democracy vs Individual Rights

In the wake of Bush's election, many liberals are worried about the threat to the separation of church and state. As they should be. However, as this author notes, without fundamental grounding in the principle of individual rights, ideas such as the separation of church and state become empty slogans. Effectively, we have the tyranny of a majority who feels that democracy justifies imposing their beliefs on the entire population. What they, and we, often forget is that America is not a democracy; it’s a constitutional republic, where the power of government is subordinate to individual rights. At least that’s what it was designed to be. The 20th century saw the erosion of individual rights, as the government became more and more entangled in private economic affairs. The corollary to that erosion is that we have lost our principle argument for protecting freedom from the religionists.