Sean
We'll see.
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2005
- Posts
- 96,202
Fantastic piece in The Atlantic about American freedom of religion laws and why Scalia was a cunt:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-strange-career-of-free-exercise/476712/
At 1 First St NE, this small dispute ran into a brash new justice, 54-year-old Antonin Scalia. He shared the general concern that the law of religious freedom was unstable. But unlike many other judges, he was sure he personally, without help from anyone, could right the top with one firm shove.
Without notice to parties or anyone else, Scalia persuaded his fellow justices to change the issue from a real question of “unemployment compensation” to an imaginary one of crime. All Smith and Black had asked for was their unemployment. Scalia blandly asserted that the two men were criminals. Smith and Black, he wrote, “urge us to hold, quite simply, that when otherwise prohibitable conduct is accompanied by religious convictions, not only the convictions but the conduct itself must be free from governmental regulation.” This was a bald-faced invention: In fact, Smith and Black asked, “quite simply,” for their unemployment compensation. The state of Oregon had never charged them with any crime. There was, in fact, a great deal of question whether peyote use was unlawful at all; anyway, under Oregon law, violations of criminal law were explicitly irrelevant to unemployment compensation.
Scalia, however, used the rewritten “facts” as a means to do away with the Sherbert test for good and all. As long as a law did not intentionally single out religion, he now wrote, the free exercise clause did not protect those whose practice was “burdened”—or even outlawed entirely. Dissenters could beg the legislature for relief; but the courts weren’t open to them. “It may fairly be said,” Scalia admitted, “that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in.” But that was an “unavoidable consequence of democratic government.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-strange-career-of-free-exercise/476712/