"Christian" Skating Time

[David Cruz]

On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, Paul Finkelman wrote:

> [snip]
> The other difference, of course, is that one IS religious and the other
> is not. It was not "Catholic night" at the ball park and I bet there
> were few priests bringing their sunday school class in for "Polish
> Catholic" night.

If Paul's point is that religious sense's (or realities) of exclusion are
different from non-religious ones, that's contestable.  Legally, however,
exclusion based on Polishness could well be ancestry or national origin
discrimination prohibited by some publica accommodations laws.

In California, in order to make their Mother's Day promotions survive
state public accommodations law, baseball stadia have taken to noting in
fine print that the frilly pink Mother's Day tote would be available to
the first X number of patrons not just mothers.  And one of the ACLU state
affiliates argued that a business owner had a First Amendment right to put
of a clearly exclusionary message as long as he did not actually
discriminate on that basis.

David B. Cruz
Professor of Law
University of Southern California Gould School of Law
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0071