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Above all he approves of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that government can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Historically, many of these provisions were introduced in order to head off the danger of violence in the name of religion, though they function nowadays mainly to protect small churches and cranky sects that pose no real threat to anyone. But their real justification, according to Dworkin, has nothing specifically to do with religion: there is no special right to religious freedom, but only what he calls a “general right to ethical independence” – or, to put it differently, a restraint on any government activity based on the assumption that one conception of the good life is superior to another. He admits that it may be hard to decide what this principle implies, but has no doubt that it rules out any attempts to criminalise homosexual acts or early abortions, outlaw same-sex marriage or force schools to teach intelligent design.

Dworkin’s secularist defence of religious freedom is thus not as paradoxical as it might seem: for him, it is no more than specific application of a purely secular right – the right to “ethical independence”. But he puts a double lock on his doctrine with an argument to the effect that, strange as it may sound, religion should not be defined in terms of belief in God, and that secular atheism of the kind he espouses should be treated by the law as a form of religion.

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– http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4313/wrong-in-the-right-way