{"id":21,"date":"2010-06-24T22:13:55","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T22:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/kagans-free-exercise-clause.html"},"modified":"2010-06-24T22:13:55","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T22:13:55","slug":"kagans-free-exercise-clause","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/kagans-free-exercise-clause.html","title":{"rendered":"Kagan’s Free Exercise Clause"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like the late Justice Potter Stewart when it came to pornography, I feel like I know religious free exercise when I see it, and I tend to see it in a lot of places. Wearing a yarmulke while in uniform? Sure. Eating peyote as a sacrament? Fine. Practicing polygamy the way they did in the Book of Genesis? So long as everyone’s a consenting adult.<\/p>\n

But when your right to practice your faith conflicts with one of my rights problems arise. You can be a devotee of a god who requires ritual cannibalism, but that doesn’t entitle you to eat me for lunch. And what happens if you believe your religion forbids you to rent that third-floor apartment to a same-sex couple, in violation of your town’s anti-discrimination housing ordinance?<\/p>\n

Under Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in Employment Division <\/i>v. Smith<\/i>, you should have to rent to the couple. That’s because the ordinance is “a neutral law of general applicability,” over which a free exercise claim cannot prevail. Working in the Clinton White House, Elena Kagan expressed what appears to be a dim view<\/a> of the Scalia standard, at least as interpreted by the California Supreme Court. <\/p>\n

Why does this matter? Because Justice John Paul Stevens, whom Kagan has been nominated to replace, was part of the 5-4 majority in Smith<\/i>. If she is confirmed, she might flip the court back to its previous standard, which require that “a compelling state interest” be found in order to overturn a free exercise claim.<\/p>\n

Church-state expert Melissa Rogers, who believes strongly in religious liberty, views<\/a> that prospect with some satisfaction. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who never wants to see a religious right trump a secular one, does not<\/a>. Personally, I like the compelling state interest test, but permitting housing discrimination on religious grounds gives me the willies. If free exercise gives you the right to discriminate against gays, as Kagan appears to believe, why shouldn’t it give you the right to discriminate against African-Americans or Jews?<\/p>\n

Will any senator ask Kagan to address this issue at her hearings? I can’t recall any recent Supreme Court nominee being asked about her views on free exercise jurisprudence. But given the recent proliferation of free exercise claims, especially on the right, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kagan is.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like the late Justice Potter Stewart when it came to pornography, I feel like I know religious free exercise when I see it, and I tend to see it in a lot of places. Wearing a yarmulke while in uniform? Sure. Eating peyote as a sacrament? Fine. Practicing polygamy the way they did in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nKagan's Free Exercise Clause - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/kagans-free-exercise-clause.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kagan's Free Exercise Clause - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Like the late Justice Potter Stewart when it came to pornography, I feel like I know religious free exercise when I see it, and I tend to see it in a lot of places. 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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\/21","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=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}