RFRA opens the door to child sex abuse or medical neglect? Really?! --Don Clark Nationwide Special Counsel United Church of Christ In a message dated 6/13/2012 3:55:26 P.M. Central Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
The truth is that gay rights and child protection communities went all out in North Dakota. Most Americans when they understand that a RFRA opens the door to discrimination or child sex abuse or medical neglect quickly cool on the extremism of a RFRA. The difference is public education Marci On Jun 13, 2012, at 4:39 PM, "Douglas Laycock" <[email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) > wrote: NARAL and Planned Parenthood spent a lot of money in a small market to defeat this. They did not spend that kind of money in Alabama, so far as I know. There have been shrill opponents in of state RFRAs in various legislatures, but I am not aware of this kind of effort by NARAL or Planned Parenthood. Why now and not before? The polarization over sexual morality is the larger cause, and the pending religious liberty claims specifically about contraception and emergency contraception are the most immediate and obvious cause. NARAL and Planned Parenthood now view religious liberty as a bad thing, because it empowers the enemy and puts outside limits on their agenda. Shameless plug: I wrote about this in general terms, pre North Dakota, in Sex, Atheism, and the Free Exercise of Religion, 88 U. Detroit Mercy L. Rev. 407 (2011): _http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/udetmr88&id=417&collect ion=usjournals&index=journals/udetmr_ (http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/udetmr88&id=417&collection=usjournals&index=journals/udetmr) Douglas Laycock Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law University of Virginia Law School 580 Massie Road Charlottesville, VA 22903 434-243-8546 From: [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Vance R. Koven Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2012 4:23 PM To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics Subject: Re: Defeat of RFRA constitutional amendment in North Dakota Behind NARAL's many inaccuracies lies a hint of what I believe may be the sociological basis for answering Eugene's question. What follows is purely speculative on my part, so just treat it as a hypothesis. The initial RFRA push was, speaking broadly, in line with a sense by evangelical Christians that their agendas, of various types, were threatened by secularists ascendant in Washington and among other political elites.That was then and this is now. Apart from liberal Connecticut and Catholic-dominated Rhode Island, most of the state RFRA enactments were in fairly conservative, heartland states. Since a lot of other states have achieved the same effect by judicial decision or existing constitutional provisions, the leftovers have to be looked at as a discrete grouping. The cross-hatched states, with the exception of New Hampshire, are all liberal, secularist places where you would expect Smith to be popular among policy-makers and not totally anathema to voters. The remaining states without any RFRA-like policies but that haven't firmly declared themselves as following Smith, with the exceptions of California, Hawaii and Vermont, are also mostly conservative heartland states, but they now have a different actuating fear, which I think is the fear (rational or not) of Islamic demands for religious-cultural exceptions from generally applicable laws. This fear directly offsets the fears of evangelical Christians, and is probably shared by a good number of them. NARAL's reference to domestic violence and child abuse look, in that context, like code words for the domestic-relations aspects of Sharia. Obviously, no RFRA statute immunizes domestic violence, but if NARAL said in so many words what it thought the voters really wanted to hear, its anti-Islamic thrust would be too obvious. _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see _http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw_ (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. = _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] 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.
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] 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.
