{"id":13,"date":"2010-06-14T16:53:57","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T16:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/elena-kagan-religion-clause-conservative.html"},"modified":"2010-06-14T16:53:57","modified_gmt":"2010-06-14T16:53:57","slug":"elena-kagan-religion-clause-conservative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/elena-kagan-religion-clause-conservative.html","title":{"rendered":"Elena Kagan, religion clause conservative"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s starting to look as though Elena Kagan may be the kind of Supreme Court justice who fits in very nicely with the post-separationist ideology of the Rehnquist and Roberts courts. In her confirmation hearings to be solicitor general, she threw under the bus<\/a> the interpretation favored by her then boss, Thurgood Marshall, and his fellow separationists in Bowen<\/i> v. Kendrick<\/i>, a case that challenged the Adolescent Family Life Act. <\/p>\n

The act
\nauthorizes Federal funds for religious organizations designed to
\ndiscourage teen pregnancy and provide care to pregnant teens. The separationist minority’s position was that the act violated
\nthe First Amendment’s ban on religious establishments because, as law clerk Kagan had put it in a memo, “when the government funding is to be used for projects so close to the
\ncentral concerns of religion, all religious organizations should be off
\nlimits.” Solicitor General-nominee Kagan called that “the dumbest thing I have ever heard.” <\/p>\n

Now comes Kagan’s view, as legal adviser in the Clinton White House, on a case in which the California Supreme Court ruled that a landlord illegally violated a state fair housing law by refusing on religious grounds to rent an apartment to an unwed couple. The landlord, Kagan indicated in a newly released memo<\/a>, had a free exercise right not to rent:<\/p>\n

The plurality’s reasoning seems to me quite outrageous — almost as if a
\ncourt were to hold that a state law does not impose a substantial burden
\non religion because the complainant is free to move to another state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One might argue that, in her earlier confirmation hearing, Kagan was just, ah, cozying up to Senate Republicans. But the internal memo is different matter. Permitting free exercise to trump anti-discrimination laws–which could include a refusal to rent to a legally married  same-sex couple–is a very big deal. It will be interesting to see whether conservative religious legal outfits like the Becket Fund and the American Center for Law and Justice decide to embrace Kagan. And whether the other side–the ACLU and Americans United–begins having serious doubts.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> Memo and the amicus brief it relates to: Kagan on RFRA.pdf<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n

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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}