The question is what people may believe, and nobody has standing to answer it for them

The argument

The second case against prohibition is that it misidentifies what is at issue. Opponents accept that religious institutions have done serious harm and that particular practices may rightly be prohibited: coercion, the withholding of medical treatment from children, incitement, the concealment of abuse. What they deny is that any of this licenses a ban on belief itself, because each of those harms is a specific act that can be legislated against directly, and doing so requires no judgement about whether the belief motivating it is true. Opponents argue that a prohibition on religion as such must rest on a judgement of exactly that kind, and that no institution is positioned to make it. A state cannot demonstrate that a religious claim is false, and if it bans on the ground of harm rather than falsity it is committed to weighing goods and harms, including the consolation, community, charitable provision and sense of obligation that religious life also supplies, against which the case has never been made. Finally, opponents argue that the proposal is self-undermining in its own terms. It is advanced on behalf of free inquiry, and would establish an official answer to the deepest question people ask, enforced by penalty. It is advanced against unaccountable authority, and would concentrate authority over conscience in the government of the day. On this account the position is not that religion is beyond criticism, but that the particular remedy of prohibition contradicts the values offered in support of it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents of a ban reply that legislating act by act has been tried and leaves the source untouched, since each prohibited practice is replaced by another drawn from the same authority. They add that no judgement of falsity is required, only a judgement of harm, which the state makes routinely about organisations and products, and that the benefits of community and consolation are available from secular sources, so crediting them to religion assumes that nothing else could supply them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the harms can be legislated against act by act is the strongest move available here, and it assumes those acts are separable from what produces them. The opposing position holds that each prohibited practice is replaced from the same authority, which the premise does not answer. [Rejecting P2] The demand that benefits be weighed is fair and is not met by this argument either, which lists consolation and charity without weighing them against the harms. The premise identifies an incomplete reckoning on both sides of the dispute. [Rejecting P3] The charge that prohibition is self-undermining holds only if free inquiry and freedom of conscience are the sole values at stake. An advocate who rests the ban on harm rather than on inquiry is untouched by it.