Word: lawfulness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...consider a bill called the Religious Liberty Protection Act, whose turgid name suggests that what the Pilgrims held dear is threatened in the very nation they founded. Supporters believe that government officials disrupt religious activities even today, despite the First Amendment's crystal-clear language: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
Proponents of the law say people like Father Timothy Mockaitis need it. In April 1996, Mockaitis went to the Lane County, Ore., jailhouse to hear the confession of Conan Wayne Hale. Authorities had charged Hale with murdering three teenagers. District Attorney F. Douglass Harcleroad, thinking Hale might break down and tell all, had secretly arranged to bug the confession...
...settlement after a federal court said the taping was wrong, in part because it violated the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The reasoning was that the D.A. had interfered with Mockaitis' religion by taping a sacrament. But in 1997 the Supreme Court struck down that law, saying it was too broad; Congress could not dictate terms of religious conduct to every community with a single law. So the new bill, an effort to achieve the same goals within more limited boundaries, applies only to individuals or institutions that receive federal funds or engage in interstate commerce...
Constitutional 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...
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...