Word: casefuls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scholars disagree over whether the new bill is still too broad, and it will surely face a Supreme Court test if it passes. But there is a more basic problem: the law may not be needed. Mockaitis, for instance, did not need the religious-liberty law to win his case. The federal court that ruled in his favor said the taping violated both the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches and seizures, and the federal Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on religion. (Hale, as it turned out, was convicted of the three murders, and the tapes, which contained...
What about other reasons cited for the law? Stern of the American Jewish Congress, who helped write the bill, says Orthodox Jewish and Native American families should not have to beg officials not to perform autopsies on their relatives. He cited a case in Eagle Pass, Texas, in which a federal judge ruled in favor of an autopsy on a member of the Kickapoo tribe who justice of the peace Martha Chacon believed might have been murdered. The judge said the state's interest in finding the truth trumped the tribe's religious concerns. In the end, though, Chacon decided...
Such bureaucratic decisions may be best kept at the local level, where officials are better equipped to weigh the complex mix of a community and individual interests. Consider the case of a Jewish student in Gulfport, Miss., who was told he could not wear a Star of David to class. School officials said the star was sometimes used by gangs, and they did not want any such imagery in classes. The case infuriated supporters of the Religious Liberty Protection Act. Once again, however, no federal intervention was required. The local school board decided after more careful consideration to reverse itself...
...when conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a Supreme Court decision that angered and frightened many religious people. In Employment Division v. Smith, Scalia said religious claims cannot be used to justify violating laws as long as those laws apply to everyone of every faith, neutrally. In the case at hand, Scalia wrote that Native Americans do not have the right to break antidrug laws even though peyote use is part of some Indian faiths...
...commission is up and running. Says a G.O.P. leadership aide: "We've got as much out of this as we can politically. We can bash the White House, and it reminds everyone what a botched operation it was; but the longer it stretches on, it brings up the nut-case crowd." An investigative source says the new disclosures are "like the Dead Sea Scrolls for the conspiracy theorists...