What we need to do is ban lawyers from holding public office.
They can hold office. Just give up their license to practice law forever and they are on the ballot.
Regarding respect for religion. It gets about as much as it deserves. Religion is a very mixed bag.
See, I don't have as much of a problem with them legislating--heck, quite a few of the folks that wrote the
Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence (more than half of the latter) were trained in the law. But if they're doing the interpreting, that's a bad thing, because they read terms of art into regular language, which is not something that a regular person would do. Additionally, the horse sense of your average joe doesn't apply to lawyers bent on getting to a specific end, which means they'll come up with penumbras and all sorts of bullshit to work around the fact that they ain't got jack in the way of law to support their opinions.
Anyway, that's why I don't mind them writing it, but letting them interpret it has gotten to be silly.