Why a secular constitution is a mere triviality

Secular Turks should relax. Not because their president, prime minister and a whole bunch of ruling party commissars outright rejected Parliament Speaker ?smail Kahraman's idea to draft a "religious" constitution so that the secular ethos of the charter goes away. Turkey will be the same Turkey with or without secular principles in its new constitution. 

Remember President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an speaking, then, as an opposition politician long before his party came to power? "A Muslim man cannot be secular," he roared. "If the nation wants it [secularism] to go away it will go away," he roared again. Simply by voting for him, his party and his prime minister 10 consecutive times since 2002 the Turks have, in all practicality, politically endorsed a man who declared his political ambition as "to raise devout [Muslim] generations" - when the charter contained powerful articles defending a secular regime and banning religion in politics. Those articles were made null and void by popular vote.

Mr. Erdo?an's definition of secularism is simple and good enough: That the state should be at an equal distance to all religious faiths including no faith. That's fine. But the trouble is, the state is NOT at an equal distance to all religious faith or no faith. What Turkey has gone through since 2002 is a de facto violation of constitutional principles often through the executive, including police powers of the state, its legislative majority and control over the judiciary. 

Now think for a moment. Journalists Hikmet Çetinkaya and Ceyda Karan, who were sentenced to two years in prison for reprinting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons? would they have been given a prison sentence had they reprinted any drawing or cartoon or article generally deemed blasphemous to...