Objective coverage of church-state and religious liberty developments, with extensive links to primary sources.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Baptisms In Prisons Face Hurdles
Romania Considering Compulsory Religion Classes In Schools
British Columbia Agency Mediates Settlement In Complaints By FLDS Women
Today's Vancouver Sun reports that the settlement gives a partial victory to the complainants. One part of it deals with government-funded schools operated by the FLDS under the Independent School Act. Government officials will be advised that the Act does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender, but it does prohibit the schools from teaching doctrines of racial or ethnic superiority or persecution, or religious intolerance. Also under the agreement, the government will provide funds for basic crisis intervention training and an information package on all available government services, including counselling and safe houses. Finally, the government will work to refine the way in which its current level of services are delivered to residents of the closed community.
Indiana Reps Want Churches To Pay For Basic Government Services
USCIRF Delegation Visiting Turkmenistan
Iraqi Christians In Mosul Face Difficulties
Deportation of High-Profile Immigrant Focuses Attention On Sanctuary Movement
This series of events poses the question of the extent to which government officials are de facto respecting churches as a place of sanctuary, even though it is fairly clear that they have no legal obligation to do so. Arellano said she left Chicago because she thought authorities were preparing to enter the church to arrest her. However, U.S. immigration enforcement officials said that it was her decision to leave the church that led to her arrest. They said it was safer to arrest her outside the church. Rev. Walter "Slim" Coleman, pastor of the Chicago church where Arellano had lived for the past year, said: "I think they obviously didn't want the embarrassment of breaking into a church and separating a mother from her son in front of the cross."
Today's Long Beach (CA) Press Telegram runs an article discussing the sanctuary movement more broadly, with a focus on Los Angeles County. It quotes Chicago's Rev. Coleman who says that the movement is "based on faith, not fear. It's not a place to hide, it's a place to bear witness that this country is destroying families."
Monday, August 20, 2007
Recent Articles of Interest
Sandeep Gopalan, From Darfur to Sinai to Kashmir: Legalization and Ethno-Religious Conflicts, (August 18, 2007).
Paul E. McGreal, Social Capital in Constitutional Law: The Case of Religious Norm Enforcement Through Prayer at Public Occasions, SUI School of Law Research Paper No. 2007-1 (Aug. 15, 2007).
Belinda M. Smith, From Wardley to Purvis - How Far has Australian Anti-Discrimination Law Come in 30 Years?, Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 07/55.
Free Exercise Defense Being Raised To Smuggling Charges
Losing Plaintiff Gives His Arguments In Church Polling Place Controversy
As I approached my polling location I passed a large, anti-abortion banner put there by the host, Emanuel Church. Inside the religious classroom that served as the voting location, I was presented with religious iconography in every direction, including directly above the voting booths.... Although abortion, stem cell research, and gay rights weren't on that ballot, they are issues candidates run on and use to receive support. And they are religious concerns. Thus religion is, in that sense, on the ballot, making a church polling place inappropriate in any fair election.
CNN To Present Series On Religious Radicals
For those who follow the news closely, there will be few major revelations in this series. Most of God's Warriors centers on pivotal events of recent history that have religious connections.... Around this historical framework, however, Amanpour and her crew expand on the events by interviewing extremists and their families and getting insights from political, cultural, and religious experts, seeking to understand the reasons behind the headlines.The series has been extensively reviewed in newspapers and online forums across the country. Here is a sampling of the reviews from AP, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Toledo Blade, and Variety. A summary of each episode is at Digital Home.
Thais Approve New Constitution by Divided Vote- No State Religion In It
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Recent Prisoner Free Exercise Cases
In Kay v. Friel, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 58205 , (D UT, Aug. 7, 2007), a Utah federal district court dismissed a prisoner’s complaint after he failed to amend it to adequately state a claim. Plaintiff’s allegation of interference with his free exercise rights was merely conclusive, and did not allege facts about the nature of his religious beliefs or about the items and rituals allegedly denied to him.
In Mustafa-Ali v. Irvin, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 58477, (SD MI, Aug. 9, 2007), a Mississippi federal Magistrate Judge rejected an inmate’s equal protection and free exercise claims. Plaintiff complained that the warden had denied him a hardback copy of the Quran, a prayer rug, special toiletry and shower facilities and a pork-free meal during Ramadan.
A case from several months ago, not previously discussed, is David v. Giurbino, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 19179 (SD CA, March 16, 2007), in which a federal judge accepted a Magistrate’s Report and Recommendation, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59160,(SD CA, Jan. 22, 2007), that plaintiff’s complaint be dismissed. The case involved a Native American prisoner’s challenge to grooming regulations that did not permit him to wear his hair long enough to extend below his shirt collar. The complaint stems from action before changes in prison policy in response to a 2005 decision by the 9th Circuit. The Magistrate Judge found that prison officials were entitled to qualified immunity because before 2005 it would not have been apparent that the prison’s policies violated RLUIPA.
In Oram v. Hulin, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60264 , (D ID, Aug. 16, 2007), an Idaho federal district court permitted a Seventh Day Adventist inmate to proceed with his claim that his First Amendment free exercise rights were violated when he was denied a religious diet. However, the court dismissed plaintiff’s equal protection claim.
Indian Tribe Seeks To Preserve Sacred Items Far From Reservation
Sri Lankan Buddhists Concerned About New Movie, "Music and Lyrics"
Connecticut Episcopal Diocese Sues Break-Away Parish
NYT Magazine Explores the Politics of God
A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference....
Even the most stable and successful democracies, with the most high-minded and civilized believers, have proved vulnerable to political messianism and its theological justification. If we can understand how that was possible in the advanced West, if we can hear political theology speaking in a more recognizable tongue, represented by people in familiar dress with familiar names, perhaps then we can remind ourselves how the world looks from its perspective.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Hindu Priest To Open California Senate Session
Court Dismisses Suit Over Expulsion of Student From Catholic School
Indian State to Ban Non-Hindu Activities Near Temple
UPDATE: Apparently this new legislation is in addition to legislation enacted in June that permits the Andhra Pradesh government to prohibit propagation of religion in places of worship other than the religion traditionally practiced there. That law, the Andhra Pradesh Propagation of Other Religions in the Places of Worship or Prayer (Prohibition) Ordinance, 2007 was implemented by Government Order 747 that applies the prohibtion to 20 Temples in the state. (Persecution Update India.) The Aug. 20 Times of India says that Christian groups will file suit in the High Court challenging the constitutionality of that Order, and arguing that it is being misapplied to also ban social work by non-Hinud groups in the 20 towns involved.