Suchergebnisse

Americans today are struggling with conflicts between religious freedom and equality law. Although such tensions are not new, they are newly vibrant and visible, partly because of egalitarian advances on issues such as LGBT rights and women's reproductive freedom. Those advances have run up against claims by religious traditionalists such as Kim Davis, the county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and Hobby Lobby, the business corporation that won the right to deny contraception coverage to its employees. Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age argues that such conflicts can be resolved without irrationality or arbitrariness. The book provides a method for thinking through problems of religion and equality in a reasoned way and recommends solutions in the areas of employment, public accommodations, government officials, and public funding.--

part Part I Frameworks and Overviews -- chapter Theoretical Frameworks -- chapter Issues and Overviews -- part Part II Discrimination against Religion -- chapter Theoretical Frameworks -- chapter Headscarf Controversies -- part Part III Discrimination by Religion -- chapter Employment, Family Law, and Customary Inheritance -- part Part IV Discrimination in Favour of Religion -- chapter Theoretical Frameworks -- chapter Crucifixes in Italian Classrooms.

When should we allow governments to deploy private-law rules in order to circumvent public-law obligations? Two cases this year call that question to mind. They ask the Supreme Court to explore interactions between property law and constitutional rules concerning free speech and antiestablishment. On the one hand, the Court recently handed down Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, which involved a Ten Commandments monument that a private religious organization donated to a city. The Court concluded that the permanent monument became government speech when the city accepted the gift, displayed it in a municipal park, and formally took ownership of the monument itself. The Justices therefore turned away a free speech challenge brought by Summum, a minority faith that wanted the city to display its monument—The Seven Aphorisms of Summum—alongside the Ten Commandments. Finding the existing monument constituted government speech allowed the Court to dismiss Summum's claim that municipal officials selectively opened the parkland to only certain types of private sectarian speech in violation of the First Amendment. The Court reasoned that Pleasant Grove could exclude Summum's monument because when the government itself speaks, it can select its message without giving equal airtime to other perspectives. (Of course government endorsement of the Ten Commandments raised obvious antiestablishment questions, which the Court did not consider because of the way the case was litigated, as I will explain.) You can think of the city's decision to accept, display, and acquire the Ten Commandments monument as the opposite of privatization—it "publicized" a sectarian symbol, both in the sense that it formally took title to the display and in that it used public property to broadcast the message. On the other hand, consider Salazar v. Buono, which the Court will hear in the fall. It concerns a white cross that has long stood in the Mojave National Preserve. After a lower court ruled that the cross was an unconstitutional establishment, ...