I have no informed view on what the bill means. Paul Krugman this morning said it will be a crime to give medical care to an illegal alien. If true, I think that would raise a serious question as applied to a Catholic or Baptist hospital.
More sensibly interpreted, I think this bill is very different from the requirement that Catholic Charities give babies to gay adoptive parents, and the resulting RFRA claims are also very different. When Catholic Charities refuses to place babies with gay parents, it has no effect on all the other adoption agencies in the state. Gay persons who wish to adopt need only go to another agency. Catholic Charities honors its own faith commitments, and the effect on everyone else is de minimis. In the clearest case on immigration -- if religious charities were smuggling people across the border and hiding them here -- the effect on others is very different. In effect, the religious charities would be replacing the legislative view of immigration policy with their own view of immigration policy. Public policy would be -- for better or worse, and probably for worse -- that very few people could come in. But religious policy would be that many people could come in, and the religious preference for many immigrants would be imposeod on everybody, the majority of whose representatives voted for very few immigrants. That is, there are inherently far more externalities in an exception to this law than in an exception to the adoption law. The further we get from smuggling people in, the weaker the government's claim gets. Hiding people known to be illegal aliens is hard to distinguish from smuggling them in. Providing food, medical care, or social services to the impoverished, knowing that some percentage of the impoverished must be illegal aliens, is a lot easier to distinguish. Yes the religious charities could investigate, but requiring them to investigate is requiring them to do the government's work, which may raise establishment clause issues about delegation to religious bodies as well as free exercise issues. I am not at all sure where the line is. But I am sure that government has a compelling interest in not letting religious organizations create their own immigration policy that supersedes the government's immigration policy. Douglas Laycock University of Texas Law School 727 E. Dean Keeton St. Austin, TX 78705 512-232-1341 (phone) 512-471-6988 (fax) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 5:20 PM To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics; religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu Subject: Re: Another Catholic Charities Issue That's very helpful, Chris. So, please allow me to repeat the question I asked last week, which did not prompt any responses then: If the new statute would, indeed, impinge on churches' religious missions as much as Chris's post suggests, then can/must/should Congress enact a religious exemption to the statute (or is such an exemption required by RFRA)? I'm particularly interested in responses from those who expressed the view that it was unlawful or grossly insensitive for Massachusetts not to include a religious exemption to the nondiscrimination provisions of its adoption-provider laws. _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.