Religious Exemptions Exercise

[Daniel Conkle]

On Friday and Saturday, I led an undergraduate student retreat here
at IU, primarily for undergraduate honors students, on issues
relating to religious liberty.  I thought that the members of this
list might be interested in one exercise that we did, and in the
students' votes, as would-be judges, in cases involving religious
exemptions.

In this exercise, the students broke up into 3 "courts" to decide
whether, post-Boerne, religious exemptions should be granted, as a
matter of *state* constitutional law (under vaguely worded religious
liberty provisions), (a) to a Christian landlady who violated a newly
adopted anti-discrimination ordinance by continuing to follow her
long-time practice of refusing to rent to unmarried or openly gay
couples and/or (b) to a (concededly sincere) vegetarian prisoner who,
relying on an individually formed spirituality, sought release from
KP duty in the prison (with alternative work assignments to be
provided) because he refused to be associated with, or to in any
facilitate, the consumption of meat products.

The landlady lost in all three of our "courts" - by votes of 4-2,
6-0, and 4-3 respectively.  The prisoner won in two courts, on votes
of 5-1 and 7-0, and lost in the third, on a vote of 7-0 (although
some of the student members of the third "court" said that they were
prepared to reconsider their views on the prisoner's claim, in light
of the reasoning presented by the other two "courts").  In any event,
the prisoner fared far better than the landlady.

Dan Conkle
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Daniel O. Conkle
Professor of Law
Indiana University School of Law
Bloomington, Indiana  47405
(812) 855-4331
e-mail conkle at indiana.edu or
danconkle at law.indiana.edu
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