Supreme Court won't hear appeal inCatholicCharitiesoftheDioceseof Alba...

[Scarberry, Mark]

Full disclosure: I participated in a moot court helping to prepare Catholic Charities' lawyers for oral argument in the Cal S Ct.
 
One of the real issues as I saw it was that the law was not a neutral law of general applicability. Conditions for its application were carefully tailured to apply to Catholic Charities, including, IIRC, a requirement that the group serve persons beyond its own faith community. So if Catholic Charities limited its ministry to Catholics, the law would not have applied. Of course then the group wouldn't have qualified for federal dollars, but that is not appropriately a matter of concern to the State of Califonia. (There was more to the argument than that, with regard to the law not being neutral or generally applicable, but I don't have the materials here with me.)
 
Mark S. Scarberry
Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law
Robert M. Zinman Scholar in Residence, American Bankruptcy Institute (Alexandria, Virginia), Fall 2007
 
 
 

________________________________

From: religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu on behalf of Steven Jamar
Sent: Wed 10/3/2007 1:02 PM
To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics
Subject: Re: Supreme Court won't hear appeal inCatholicCharitiesoftheDioceseof Alba...



isn't it about more than just spending money that would violate their
faith -- isn't it even more about being required to DO something that
would violate beliefs?

For that, who pays what doesn't matter.

On 10/3/07, Brownstein, Alan <aebrownstein at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
>
>>
> When we are talking about money - which is what this case is about - the
> free exercise interest here isn't the right of Catholic Charities to be
> exempt from a financial expense that all other employers must accept, it is
> the right not to be required to spend the money in a way that violates the
> tenets of their faith. (By analogy, the free exercise interest of the
> religious pacifist is not in being exempt from a civil obligation of public
> service for two years of his life, it is in not having that service directed
> to killing people in war.)
>
--
Prof. Steven Jamar
Howard University School of Law
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