still waiting for concrete examples

[ArtSpitzer at aol.com]

Marci-

I must be slow today.

1. Why does what I said "explain the district court's frustration with what 
it was being asked to do"?   If you're suggesting that the judge was pissed 
at my clients (or at their lawyer) for having somehow caused the Fire 
Department to make lots of other firefighters shave, I saw no evidence of any 
such thing.   I think he was oblivious to it.   I would have wished he were 
more attentive to it -- it would have made him hostile to the Department.   Or 
was your reasoning something else entirely?

2. And I still don't understand why you think requiring all firefighters to 
be clean-shaven would defeat the RFRA claim.   Can you help me figure that 
out?

Art Spitzer


In a message dated 6/22/09 1:00:27 PM, Hamilton02 at aol.com writes:

> Thanks.  That explains the district court's frustration with what it was 
> being asked to do. 
>   
>  Marci
>   
>  In a message dated 6/22/2009 12:46:06 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, 
> ArtSpitzer at aol.com writes:
> 
>  I don't think I understand the question, perhaps because I'm not familiar 
> with the CLUB case.  A violation of RFRA doesn't depend on any 
> discrimination; it's enough that the government declines to accommodate a religious 
> exercise, that its failure to do so imposes a substantial burden on the 
> plaintiff's exercise of religion, and that the government could accommodate the 
> religious exercise without significantly undercutting a compelling 
> interest.  Right?  So when the Fire Department failed to show that half a dozen 
> bearded men couldn't safely be accommodated, it lost.  (My own view is that an 
> unlimited number of bearded men could be accommodated, but the court 
> didn't have to find that.)
> 
> Had the Fire Department continued to allow scores of firefighters to wear 
> beards for medical reasons (which it had allowed at from at least the 1970s 
> until mid-2005), the case would have been over much sooner.  But the 
> Department's lawyer realized that, and the (white) Chief decided that he'd 
> rather force all those (black) firefighters with pseudofolliculitis barbae to 
> shave than allow a small number of firefighter to wear religious beards.  It 
> didn't make much sense to me.
> 
> Art
> 
> 




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