The sentence has to be read in context. The issue is the reach or ambit of claims of "religious associational autonomy and privacy." To the extent that the law recognizes or grants or accommodates the claim, the law is declaring the claim to be "religious." I suppose one could say that we accommodate some religious claims and not others. But it is not unheard of, in legal analysis and discourse, to say that if we grant a claim then the claim is "X" and if we do not grant or enforce a claim then the claim is "not X." My use of quotation marks clearly indicates that I was using the term in precisely that sense.
-----Original Message----- From: Volokh, Eugene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 2:26 PM To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics Subject: "Oppression should never qualify as 'religious'" I'm puzzled here; I can certainly understand a rule under which the government may have a compelling interest in stopping oppressive conduct, though then the question is what constitutes oppression. But at the threshold, where we're deciding whether conduct is religious or not, how can it make sense to treat conduct that (say) an actor believes to be mandated by his religious belief system as "not religious" simply because we think this conduct is "oppressive"? Eugene Michael Newsom writes: Ed, we are largely together here. We need to understand, however, what "within the confines of those organizations" means. But that, in turn, invites an inquiry more generally into the reach or ambit of religious associational autonomy and privacy. The difficulty largely concerns activities conducted by religious organizations that, to use Noonan and Gaffney's felicitous term, do double duty, that is, serve both religious and secular purposes. The Court has indicated some unwillingness, at least in Title VII cases, to probe too deeply into the boundary, if any, that might exist between the religious and the secular. See Amos. But it would be difficult to argue that the courts should never consider the boundary question, regardless of circumstances. It would be fair to consider, given the history of oppression, whether a claim that an activity is "religious" might merely in reality be a sham, a cover for continued oppression. Oppression should never qualify as "religious." We won't get neat and tidy results, using such and approach, but we stand a good chance of getting fair and defensible results if we do. _______________________________________________ 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. _______________________________________________ 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.
