{"id":29,"date":"2010-07-08T13:24:54","date_gmt":"2010-07-08T13:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/dreher-v-scotus.html"},"modified":"2010-07-08T13:24:54","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T13:24:54","slug":"dreher-v-scotus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/dreher-v-scotus.html","title":{"rendered":"Dreher v. SCOTUS"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Religion freedom rolled back by SCOTUS” proclaims yesterday’s post<\/a>
\nby Rod Dreher on the Supreme Court’s decision<\/a>
\nin Christian Legal Society v. Martinez<\/i>. Taking off from a post<\/a>
\nby Wendy Kaminer over at the Atlantic, Dreher claims the court
\n“believes that it’s licit to protect other groups, while singling
\ntraditional Christians out for special discrimination.”<\/p>\n

That’s nonsense. What the court has done is decide that the Hastings Law
\nSchool’s “all comers” rule for providing support to student groups
\napplies to the “traditional Christians” who run the Christian Legal
\nSociety. But what Dreher really needs to recognize is that the decision
\nhas nothing whatsoever to do with religious freedom–because two decades
\nago the court seriously truncated the ability of religious individuals
\nand groups to make Free Exercise claims. <\/p>\n

I won’t repeat myself explaining this<\/a>, except to say that the irony here is that it was
\nJustice Scalia and his conservative allies (plus John Paul Stevens) who
\nput in place the current standard that such claims cannot prevail
\nagainst “neutral laws of general applicability.” As the majority in Christian
\nLegal Society<\/i> makes clear, an “all comers” policy is neutral and
\ngenerally applicable. Dreher’s beef should be with Scalia & Co., who
\ndenied traditional Christians and everybody else the ability to make
\nspecial claims on behalf of their religious views, in line with the way
\nthe First Amendment singles out Free Exercise for special protection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Religion freedom rolled back by SCOTUS” proclaims yesterday’s post by Rod Dreher on the Supreme Court’s decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Taking off from a post by Wendy Kaminer over at the Atlantic, Dreher claims the court “believes that it’s licit to protect other groups, while singling traditional Christians out for special discrimination.”…<\/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-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nDreher v. SCOTUS - 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\/07\/dreher-v-scotus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dreher v. SCOTUS - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“Religion freedom rolled back by SCOTUS” proclaims yesterday’s post by Rod Dreher on the Supreme Court’s decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. 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SCOTUS"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/","name":"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","description":"Beliefnet Voices","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/927f8b0a579506efe527e8e0967f519d","name":"Mark Silk","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","caption":"Mark Silk"},"description":"Mark Silk graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. 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\/29","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=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}