"Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution"
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Yeats lands the warning with the cool precision of someone who watched a country try to legislate its soul. “Once you attempt” does a lot of work: it frames the danger as a point of no return, a small procedural step that becomes an irreversible moral permission slip. The sentence isn’t just anti-theocracy; it’s anti-precedent. The moment the state claims it can translate religious conviction into law, it inherits religion’s absolutism, and politics stops being negotiation and becomes excommunication.
The subtext is Yeats’s suspicion of purity projects. Religious “grounds” sound stable, even noble, but he treats them as a trapdoor: once policy is justified by divine mandate, disagreement can’t be treated as normal dissent. It has to be treated as sin. That’s why his escalation to “every kind” of intolerance feels less like hyperbole than like pattern recognition. He’s describing the logic of enforcement: if you’ve authorized coercion in the name of the sacred, you’ve authorized cruelty with a clean conscience.
Context matters. Yeats wrote amid Ireland’s turbulent nation-building, when Catholic moral authority and political identity increasingly braided together, and when revolutionary zeal could harden into social policing. As a poet who flirted with mysticism yet feared mass dogma, he’s guarding a paradox: private belief can be profound, but public power fueled by belief becomes brittle and punitive. The line reads like a forecast of culture wars before the term existed: the state doesn’t just regulate behavior; it teaches citizens which kinds of people count as legitimate.
The subtext is Yeats’s suspicion of purity projects. Religious “grounds” sound stable, even noble, but he treats them as a trapdoor: once policy is justified by divine mandate, disagreement can’t be treated as normal dissent. It has to be treated as sin. That’s why his escalation to “every kind” of intolerance feels less like hyperbole than like pattern recognition. He’s describing the logic of enforcement: if you’ve authorized coercion in the name of the sacred, you’ve authorized cruelty with a clean conscience.
Context matters. Yeats wrote amid Ireland’s turbulent nation-building, when Catholic moral authority and political identity increasingly braided together, and when revolutionary zeal could harden into social policing. As a poet who flirted with mysticism yet feared mass dogma, he’s guarding a paradox: private belief can be profound, but public power fueled by belief becomes brittle and punitive. The line reads like a forecast of culture wars before the term existed: the state doesn’t just regulate behavior; it teaches citizens which kinds of people count as legitimate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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