On Sunday, December 7, 2003, at 08:37 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I think this falls into the oh, good grief! category.
or perhaps, given the teacher's attorney's name, the good Greif category. :)
Here's the story as listed at the First Amendment Center:
Maine teacher sues district over
FWIW, I did not use the term creationists pretty much for the reasons proffered by Eugene. And also because I cannot prove, scientifically or otherwise, that there is no creator and that there are no ongoing acts of interference by a creator in the ordinary activity of evolution. I believe that
Religion is a special category. It is treated specially in the Constitution and in IHR instruments and in constitutions worldwide.
NIMBY ought not be allowed to reign for siting religious structures. There ought to be good space zoned for religious groups to meet. And for certain size groups,
The First Amendment issue would seem to turn on subjective intent here. Mission architecture, and the missions themselves are an important part of the history of California. So if the intention is to make students more aware of architecture and architectural influences of the missions on modern
I hope no one takes seriously
1. that the editor of the harvard law review is so easily cowed or
2. that any single academic has such power to ruin another's career
two over-the-top points made in the nro article.
Seems being over the top and alarmist is not all on one side.
--
Prof. Steven
I suppose one could point to the failure to examine the premises of Beckwith's book may be one. Passing off as a scholarly examination something which is really an apologist's essay may be a bit fraudulent. Sorta like pretending many commentators are in fact reporters. Though I don't believe
Two Unitarian Universalist Ministers were arrested in NY for performing same-sex marriages under the power granted them by the state, not just as religious unions. Of course the typical faultlines are exposed - including claims of violation of separation of church and state. But surely that
Here is what another article said:
Unitarian Universalist ministers Kay Greenleaf and Dawn Sangrey were charged with multiple counts of solemnizing a marriage without a license, the same charges leveled against New Paltz Mayor Jason West, who last month drew the state into the widening national
Since the reports are not done by the folk on this list it is sometimes hard to be sure of the facts in the way we would like to be. But after spending way to much time drifting around on this, I think this much is correct (but am definitely not going to stand by it as fully correct- no doubt
Ah, philosophy!
One can see things in human nature and not say that they are from god. One can assert natural rights without claiming they come from god.
It surprises me how utilitarian the argument for under God has become - it is useful to limit government by explicitly saying it is subject
I think part of the reason for the cursory treatment of Rosenberger is
that Rosenberger really is not as broad or likely to be expanded or
extended beyond its particular facts as advocates of the majority
decision would like it to be.
There is a difference between the religion clauses and
i haven't studied it for awhile, but i don't recall the test for defamation being how the person feels about it, but rather how others perceive it. unless it is defamation per se. it seems pretty unlikely that accusing someone of believing in Jesus is on a par with saying he or she has a
On Thursday, May 27, 2004, at 10:49 AM, Rick Duncan wrote:
I think the point is that from an economic
perspective, there is little or no difference between
a targeted $1,000 tax and a targeted exclusion from a
generally available $1,000 benefit.
One difference in practice would be that all the
/2/04 9:08 PM, Steven Jamar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Speak for yourself. That is not how I use the words or how many
people
I regularly discuss things with use them. Your assumption that that
is
how they are being used creates problems.
That would make me sectarian. :-) All kidding aside, what
Would it be defamatory to assert, as many fundamentalist Christians do about others of different denominations, that a person who considers herself to be a Christian, is not one?
Would it be defamatory to assert, as some of my relatives do about me, that I am damned to hell because I don't
Party or X has told me he always votes Democrat; the
examples below are like someone saying X's beliefs aren't really
compatible with what Democrats should believe or X's policies are
lousy for this country.
Eugene
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Steven Jamar
Sent
Sorry, but I don't see any of this as demonstrable or even as really very relevant to the interpretation of or to a consideration of the value of the religion clauses.
1. Free exercise is a valuable thing regardless of a law insuring it which affects various groups differently. The different
On Monday, June 14, 2004, at 02:04 PM, Will Linden wrote:
Or if in 1967, the excommunication of Leander Perez has been preceded by a presidential colloquy seeking papal support for civil rights campaigns. (Sorry, but for years I have been driven up the wall by increasingly incoherent
bedrock. Still, is there a reason why we should not concede that he
is -- or, at least, MAY be -- correct?
Best,
Rick Garnett
The Civil War Amendments rewrote the Constitution. People are entitled
to protection against establishment period. Limiting the states is what
happened with our
Sorry, Jim, but of course it is coercive to force an elementary or middle or high school student to publicly opt out of a REQUIREMENT.
It is not just evangelical Christians who have a hard time of it in school. Anyone who seeks to do something different does.
Steve
The Elk Grove School
I doubt a court would tell a church to fire priests. But it could conceivably set limits on various line items in the budget, including total salaries for priests, physical plant budget, etc. Indeed, it seems it would need to so something like that. The church sought the protection of
On Friday, July 9, 2004, at 12:03 PM, Will Esser wrote:
I assume that virtually none of these fraud claims are based on an alleged explicit representation by the Diocese (i.e. As the bishop, I certify that this priest has never been involved in pedophilic activity). That leaves us with
Granting of insurance by an insurance company has never been relevant in any case I ever heard of -- car, house, commercial, specialty lines, etc.
And insurance doesn't normally protect against fraud does it?
On Friday, July 9, 2004, at 12:54 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Churches find it
Ann,
I appreciate your post and sympathize with your conundrum of what
happened in class. But it seems to me that to encourage showing
respect, the principal should have talked to the teacher and the other
students about respecting the minority beliefs of the affected student,
not the other
How quickly we wander far afield from the original point and stretch
what each other never intended! Surely the school can (and IMHO ought
to) teach and perhaps even inculcate respect for country. And respect
for other students. And teachers. And the UN. Treating each other
with respect
On Friday, September 10, 2004, at 09:03 PM, Robert O'Brien wrote:
Mark Scarberry is dead on; the school can attempt to persuade the
student to say the secular parts of the Pledge. Government can lead
opinion, or attempt to, on secular matters, but not on religious
matters.
Does this not
Can a school teach respect for diversity and tolerance for difference
and teach civility and respect for others' beliefs without targeting
those who say everyone else is damned and seeking to quash such speech
on campus?
I fear that one of the problems is the desire for neat, clear,
Surely explaining why some students find it objectionable is ok -- teaching tolerance and understanding cannot be wrong. But there would be a line somewhere when the explanation becomes instruction not to do it at all that might be a problem.
Steve
On Tuesday, November 9, 2004, at 09:39 AM,
But Eugene, doesn't your solicitude for individuated, non-group focused
jurisprudence in the area of rights trump everything for you here, like
it has nearly always done for the S Ct in the death penalty cases?
That is, every fact matters, and group-based analysis (one religious
group or
Buddhism.
On Friday, November 12, 2004, at 12:26 PM, Paul Finkelman wrote:
Except for the Society of Friends, the Mennonites and a few other
pietistic faiths, please tell me what religion out there qualifies as
a religion of peace?
Pual Finkelman
--
Prof. Steven D. Jamar
It is lawful to discriminate for and against religions. Indeed the
Constitution mandates EXACTLY that.
The government can establish lots of things (or seek to), e.g.,
patriotism, individualism, tolerance. But it cannot establish
religion. It therefore must discriminate in what it chooses
Surely education is a compelling state interest and requiring attendance as a part of that and setting an attendance policy is within the discretion of the school board. This is a decision not for the courts.
At some point there needs to be some accommodation. But it cannot be an accommodation
But then where does the court draw the line? 8 days? 14? 20? What is the least restrictive alternative to requiring attendance? They aren't home schooling-- they are asking to be exempted from truly generally applicable neutral rules.
Steve
On Tuesday, November 23, 2004, at 06:57 PM, Volokh,
The examples we trot out show why courts try not to decide hypothetical
cases.
I am not a fan of Smith and I really think the state should be required
to accommodate reasonable requests. Just what constitutes a least
restrictive alternative does, of course, vary with the magnitude of
the
Well, if that were the test, my kids could have attended the first day, come in for the tests, and played the rest of the time. As could about 15-20% of the students. If all we are concerned about is grades. But that is not the only learning going on in school, is it.
On Tuesday, November 23,
Ok. Shifting targets are harder to hit. Who is to decide when substantial impairment kicks in? What authority is there that that is the standard of evaluation? And why courts instead of elected officials?
And again, why should someone be allowed to skip school for a ceremony that is not needed
The rule is could be expelled. There is no reason to think that a
kid would be expelled only for missing 8 or 10 classes. It seems to me
that sending a notice is proper and may even be required and that
discretion in enforcement is proper as well. So, how could this rule
NOT stand --
such a regime
make sense as to these sorts of claims, where the usual Tinker/Fraser
concerns about disruption or vulgarity don't apply?
Eugene
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Steven Jamar
Sent: Tue 11/23/2004 11:01 PM
To: Law Religion issues for Law Academics
Cc
Huh?
On Wednesday, November 24, 2004, at 11:32 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In a message dated 11/24/2004 11:18:54 AM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
But are the rules neutral?
In fact, does the focus have to be on how majoritarian religions are accommodated by the force of
I haven't seen anyone say that students ought not be accommodated for some limited number of religious holy days. So I think there is general agreement on that part of it. And I think that getting school boards to recognize holidays as excused absences makes a lot of sense. It seems that any
No single concept, whether coercion or accommodation or equality or equal treatment or any other concept that has been advocated as the way in which to analyze EC or FE problems is sufficient. Hence my advocacy of an approach that clearly articulates the principles to be used and the interests to
It is not an easy line to draw, but schools can teach about religion, about religious beliefs, about the roles of religion in history, and so on. But schools cannot teach the religion as truth. The school can teach that Muslims belief there is but one god and Mohammed is his prophet, but cannot
Is it a sociology class? I think it depends a lot on purpose and presentation.
I also think that we as lawyers, having been trained in a certain kind of compartmentalization and detachment and objectivity (please don't ignore the certain kind and blast me for an assertion I am not making),
I like Prof. Levinson's hypo. Here's another one:
Under Islam, Jesus is believed to have been born of the Virgin Mary and
is considered a holy prophet. Read the Koran and other Islamic
religion sources and contrast this view to the Christian view of Jesus
as Messiah.
On Friday, December 10,
Sandy, I agree that there is value in multiplicity in the three examples you mention, including critiques of evolution. But there is a difference between evolution (an established fact) and disagreements about the mechanism by which it works. Requiring teaching that evolution is false is not an
That things tend toward disorder does not mean that order cannot and does not arise. Order arises in all physical systems without violating the laws of thermodynamics. The laws relating to chemistry and biology also matter as do such laws of physics like quantum dynamics.
The specious entropy
On Thursday, December 16, 2004, at 12:22 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
(As an aside, I always wonder that those with whom we agree never proselyze, they only offer irrefutable arguments, while those whose views are disagreeable are readily described as proselytizing. There is, it seems, a
On Friday, December 17, 2004, at 12:18 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The question of how much it is being used/abused I reflected on anecdotally from my experience litigating these cases for nearly twenty years. A very quick electronic search on Lexis, of Supreme Court briefs, reveals some 300
Just as an aside, the Mosaic laws are much more than 10 and they track suspicously with the so-called 42 Negative Confessions of Egypt of the time Moses is supposed to have left Egypt with the Jews.
Of course it might just be that a number of the ideas about living a good, moral life have little
On Friday, December 10, 2004, at 02:27 PM, Ed Brayton wrote:
Steven Jamar wrote:
Is it a sociology class? I think it depends a lot on purpose and
presentation.
Mr. Williams teaches 5th grade.
I should have been more clear -- I was responding to Henderson's
inquiry about could such an assignment
I've said it before; I'll say it again: Don't cloud the issue with facts!
:)
NPR ran a story yesterday on the Williams case. The link is here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4224577. According to the story, the principal had received many complaints about Williams over
Prof. Lipkin was proselytized by his neighbor. They both handled it with tolerance and maturity. How does that change the fact of proselytization? How does what the neighbor did not constitute an inducement to change religions -- the definition of proselytize? This was no mere it came up in
The report is an obvious, albeit well done, satire. The SAT does not test knowledge of science even in the section formerly known as verbal and soon to be known as critical reading. It gives students a passage to read and asks questions designed to test their reading comprehension. It does NOT
If it is legal to explain and teach about religions and religion, but it is illegal to proselytize, then it seems to be not merely a word-choice distinction, but a conclusion with legal consequences. If the argument is that the particular activity constitutes illegal proselytization, then that
I doubt Yoder comes out the same today -- even with this Court. The advent of home schooling to state-set standards changes things substantially, I think. We now generally accept that the state may set certain standards for education up to a certain age -- though we do allow drop-outs -- and
Bobby,
Thanks for the helpful summing up.
The Egyptian Constitution originally noted the Shariah (Islamic law) as a source of law. It was more recently amended (15 or so years ago) to make the Shariah the source of law.
I think one plausible reason god is not mentioned is the very varied
Of course schools teach religious values all the time -- just not ones identified by name with a particular religion. Truth, fairness, the everything-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten values.
Steve
On Friday, February 18, 2005, at 02:06 PM, Scarberry, Mark wrote:
A possible argument
What happened to Sunday School? Parents don't bring their kids there
so they churches want the captive audience. When I was a kid we had
Wednesday School -- Wed. morning release time -- with about double
the attendance as at Sunday School -- even worse ratio during hunting
season, of course.
If the state sponsored chess or other meaningful activity during the release time, then there would be parents complaining about discrimination because their students who were released for religious training are missing out on some instruction. If the state continued classroom instruction, then
The problem, Rick, is that parents are being forced to choose between things they want the kids to do -- whereas religion only release programs assume people are in one and only one congregation -- a mostly true assumption. Many kids do cub scouts and 4-H and soccer, etc.
On Saturday, February
No. Release time is not about shortening the school day to do something worthwhile. It is about religion, pure and simple. And I, and many of my friends, hated wednesday school -- putting on coats and boots and boarding busses to go to church to hear volunteer parents try to explain stuff to us
Isn't the question one of should liberal law professors not oppose him? There is a difference between supporting and simply choosing not to actively oppose. I might prefer someone else, but choose not to oppose a particular candidate, saving my few arrows for a more important target. Replacing
Hmmm. Intellectual integrity? Please explain how anything done as described in your post constitutes intellectual integrity. If I have a standard of the characteristics I think a judge should have, is it not intellectual integrity to judge all candidates by those standards, whatever they may
Thanks for the clarification, but I still have a problem with your definition of integrity.
On Wednesday, February 23, 2005, at 05:29 PM, Stuart BUCK wrote:
Let me put it this way, since my first attempt was apparently unclear:
Liberals might be warranted in opposing McConnell, just as
Integrity may be an acceptable word so long as it is not excluding by
using it the people noted in your second sentence below. That was the
substance of my objection -- that acting to support someone who one
disagrees with on many things is not the only act of integrity in such
situations,
I think the Court could dividedly say that the 10 Commandments are part of our juridical heritage and we use history and tradition to justify some things and we have no coercion here and some accommodation could creep in, and state sponsorship is attenuated; plus Moses is on the mural in the
Just to make clear where I stand, again. I think the display of the 10 commandments is a violation of the establishment clause. Period.
I was responding to the question about predicting what the Court might do by in part sketching a way in which the Court might do it and justify itself in doing
On Wednesday, March 2, 2005, at 08:39 AM, Paul Finkelman wrote:
Even if that is true, to only put the Ten C. is historically inaccurate and to claim it is historical is pretextual.
Of course it is. But my point was, again, that the Court could well do exactly that no matter how much you
The bill of rights refers in common and professional parlance to the first 10 amendments, not to amendments 1-12. Mr. Henderson, what were the other two articles? I looked at the webpage and still see only the first 10 amendments. I don't know whether the I-X is the 10 commandments or the bill
Those articles are not part of the bill of rights.
On Wednesday, March 2, 2005, at 02:36 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In a message dated 3/2/2005 12:55:57 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Mr. Henderson, what were
the other two articles?
Article the First sets the number of
US law on establishment is decidedly different from that of most of the world. Indeed, most states do not have a prohibition on establishment, just a guarantee of free exercise. I do not think that the US needs to have establishment law as it does to preserve religious freedom, but as it has
You think that at any time in the 20th century the term Bill of Rights referred to 12 articles instead of the first 10 ratified amendments? Let me see the history to prove that assertion. Your assertion on this list is the first time I have ever heard the US Bill of Rights as other than the
Ok, but I've not seen Catholics or Jews or Muslims pushing for:
prayers starting school
prayers at football games
using religious arguments as superior to positive law
young-earther anti-evolution creationism
creches
I do not recall seeing any Catholics or Jews pushing this as part of their
Isn't an accommodation denominational discrimination? And don't we encourage and even require that? It is troublesome only in the sense that sometimes applying the requirement is difficult or troublesome. Is that what you meant or did you mean doctrinally troublesome?
Steve Jamar
On Thursday,
Does it matter that the government is not actually openly hostile to religion? Or is the relevant inquiry really is seen by many?
Steven Jamar
On Saturday, March 5, 2005, at 09:12 AM, Richard Dougherty wrote:
Well, yes, but not in a political order where the government -- especially
Even if Marci won't I will. It is not a widespread pattern of suppression. And that some schools made mistakes does not show governmental or court hostitility. Furthermore, it was the courts who let the religion back into the schools when the schools went overboard.
I think most of the
All the active movement I see are from religious groups pushing to establish religion by putting their religion in the public face or demanding that their religion be front and center rather than simply be accommodated.
Of course there are too many instances of teachers and principals on school
On Tuesday, March 8, 2005, at 08:01 AM, Brad Pardee wrote:
In the end, if the government prohibits what my faith commands or commands what my faith prohibits, does it really make a difference whether the government was openly hostile or simply didn't care?
To you? Apparently not.
To the law
The term hire refers to any position in which one is employed,
regardless of how one got there or the motivation for doing so.
There is, of course, an exemption for religious positions in religious
organizations in Title VII and it would be required in any event under
the Free Exercise clause.
Not exactly, I think. The law allows sex to be BFOQ. Of course the BFOQ comes from the religious beliefs which in turn are what is protected by the First Amendment. Other BFOQs based on sex include things like restroom attendants and roles in operas and plays and movies -- though Elizabethan
Assume there was no exemption for religious organizations per se under Title VII. But assume there was a BFOQ exemption for any employer, including religious organizations. Can there be any doubt that the free exercise clause would be applied to permit Catholics to ordain only men into the
I take it that challenges are improper even if well grounded? Not all challenges, of course, prevail (Rosenberger).
On Monday, March 14, 2005, at 04:53 PM, Anthony Picarello wrote:
Then, with the sole exception of federal constitutional amendments, religious groups can expect Establishment
On Monday, March 14, 2005, at 06:20 PM, Volokh, Eugene wrote:
Rather, my argument is
that the Free Exercise Clause ought not be read as allowing people to do
things that harm others simply because they feel a religious obligation
to do those things.
So you would be against displays of the 10
In the March 21, 2005 New Yorker is an article entitled Jesus in the Classroom about Williams' suit in Cupertino -- the falsely balleyhooed School District Bans the Declaration of Independence case.
There is a related discussion at http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?050321on_onlineonly01 .
On Friday, April 8, 2005, at 11:14 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Labeling religions majoritarian and minority is both bootstrapping and inaccurate. There is no majority religion in the United States.
I guess, then, that Christianity does not constitute a religion. I assume what was meant was
>From some perspectives, the only meaningful difference among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is when they stopped accepting new prophets-- Christianity with Jesus, Islam with Mohammed, Judaism (not stopped yet). All look to Moses, all claim a belief in one god, all started in the same part of
As a bit of an aside, perhaps, the "compelling interest" standard of Korematsu, or as Bobby appropriately labeled it, "compelling interest with deference," is the standard we use rather than anything directly from Brown v. Board. Brown v. Board changed the country and indeed the law, but it
This very paradox -- and the problems of the limits of logic and language in the law -- was the main impetus for an article I wrote some years back about how RFRA could not be interpreted or applied in a literal way. Instead, there is an inherent sliding scale of compellingness of the interest
Time for another AALS panel writing the obit for Lemon? :)SteveOn May 31, 2005, at 12:12 PM, Stuart BUCK wrote:So has the Lemon test been interred, or not? Compare footnote 6 of the majority ("We resolve this case on other grounds."), with Thomas's footnote 1 ("The Court properly declines to
My guesses:On Jun 1, 2005, at 9:30 AM, Marc Stern wrote: Footnote 8 in Justice Ginsburgs opinion suggests that the state has no obligation to pay for aninmates devotional accessories. What does this sentence-which involved no issue litigated in Cutter mean for the cost of chaplains (especially
On Jul 25, 2005, at 6:07 PM, Gene Garman wrote: Words mean things or the Constitution is nothing more than a blank piece of paper. This is a faulty dilemma. Of course words mean things. But they are not so hard-edged and clear as to be incapable of multiple meanings and there are always things
I don't think Jim and I are as far apart as he may think here -- but language is hard to get right in this sort of dialogue. I do not think the donative meaning of each word should change with time. For example, the intellectual property clause would be very difficult to apply today if we used
The area of religion and law presents a challenge to the notion of
rule of law. The phrase rule of law, like the term law itself,
becomes increasing problematic the more rigorously one tries to
define or otherwise delimit it. This is a problem philosophers
always seem to have with law --
There is, of course, one basic problem with Gene Garman's argument to the extent it is premised on the First Amendment before the Civil War Amendments. It says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." By its terms it did not limit what states can or cannot do.
Jim, are you seriously saying that pluralistic and tolerant are not able to mutually exclusive? A society cannot be both pluralistic and tolerant? I've never heard tolerance offered in contrast to pluralistic. I've only ever seen them hand in hand -- we are pluralistic and tolerant of
OOPS. I meant mutually exist. An editing problem. Sorry.SteveOn Jul 29, 2005, at 8:04 PM, Steven Jamar wrote:Jim, are you seriously saying that pluralistic and tolerant are not able to mutually exclusive? A society cannot be both pluralistic and tolerant? I've never heard tolerance offered
I oppose teaching creationism, including intelligent design, in science courses. However, I think this topic should be an appropriate subject for an elective in HS, especially if taught from the historical or sociological or political perspective. I don't even get very exorcised about biology
On Aug 2, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Brad M Pardee wrote: But maybe I'm naive to think that the hostility to any possibility of the supernatural in some realms of the scientific community can be overcome. Brad Pardee__There are many scientists who also believe
There is a difference between grants of power and limits on that power, isn't there? At least with respect to what Congress can address. Merely because something is within the Beckwithian concept of "federal concern" does not give Congress the power to act. Even when Congress has the power to
Who created god?Some of us believe that indeed the universe "was not designed and has no purpose" and that the question "why is there anything?" is interesting, but at present beyond the ability of anyone to answer convincingly.Some of us also believe that "we humans are the product of
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