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r One of the paradoxes implicit in democratic theory is that the rules of democratic dialogue within the government cannot be enforced directly against individual citizens in their discourse conducted outside the government. The democratic requisites of free speech and open discussion could not operate effectively if the constitutional regime allowed private citizens to participate in public discourse about political policies only if they agreed in advance to speak in terms that were universally accessible to everyone else in society. If this conception of democracy is correct, then the government may not base policy on religious grounds. If the government bases policy on religious grounds, it renounces the central democratic requisite of popular control (because it grants legal status to the dictates of a supernatural entity, viz. God); and it effectively forecloses any dialogue about the wisdom of particular policies. There is no point in debating the proposition that “God said so.” Thus, the rule of universal political accessibility prohibits the government from basing its policies on religious grounds—and hence, the Lemon secular purpose requirement. As a practical matter, this requirement will not prevent some legislators from surreptitiously slipping their religious views into law, but it will prevent them from doing so if they cannot satisfy the courts that there is some plausible nonreligious rationale for each policy. The mandate to explain policies in secular terms will not only prevent the government from enacting legislation that is exclusively theological, but will also force legislators to internalize the essential democratic lesson that they must respect the viewpoints of political opponents, instead of only seeing opponents as apostates, heretics, or sinners