Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- Belgium’s Council of State heard oral arguments last week to decide whether laws banning kosher and halal slaughtering techniques violate Belgium’s constitution and the European Union’s Charter of Rights.
- Noah Gaston, a Maine man accused of fatally shooting his wife, invoked religious privilege as prosecutors seek to introduce statements made to fellow church members whom Gaston claims are leaders in his church group.
- New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed two new bills into law, one protecting transgender people from discrimination and another banning conversion therapy for minors.
- A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Muslim woman under the First Amendment and the Oklahoma Religious Freedom Act, claiming she was denied entry into the Tulsa County Courthouse because of her religious headscarf.
- Proposed legislation in Utah would require the sex listed on birth certificates to reflect the person’s sex at birth, barring people from later changing it based on gender identity.
- A federal judge in Arkansas upheld a state law requiring state contractors to agree not to boycott Israel, finding that such boycotts are not protected by the First Amendment.
- Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Chinese Christian and Jakarta’s former governor, was released from prison on Thursday after completing a two-year sentence for blasphemy against Islam.
- Catholic lay leaders are calling on Cardinal Timothy Dolan to excommunicate New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for signing the Reproductive Health Act, which allows women to abort babies up to the moment of their birth.
- Lawmakers in six states (FL, IN, MO, ND, VA, and WV) have proposed legislation that would require or encourage public schools to offer elective courses on the Bible’s literary and historical significance.
- A former employer of Catholic Charities is suing the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg (FL), claiming his supervisor, the executive director, made unwanted sexual advances.
- A Iowa state judge held that the state’s “fetal heartbeat” law, which bans doctors from performing most abortions once a heartbeat is detected, violated the Iowa Constitution.
- Muslims in the southern Philippines voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to create a new autonomous region in hopes of lifting the impoverished region out of decades of conflict.
- Vermont legislators introduced the Freedom of Choice Act, which, if passed, would prohibit public entities from interfering with or restricting women’s access to abortions.
- Rhode Island legislators introduced two new bills to legalize abortion up to the moment of birth, replicating New York’s new Reproductive Health Act.
- Sixty-one Rohingya Muslims were arrested in Assam and Tripura in northeastern India as they seek refuge from the Indian government.
- An Orthodox Jewish psychotherapist filed a lawsuit challenging New York City’s new law prohibiting conversion therapy.
- Two bombs exploded during Sunday Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in southern Philippines, killing twenty and injuring dozens more.
Next month, Marc and I will among the speakers at “Religion and the Administrative State,” a conference sponsored by the 
If you want to know about the law of religious freedom in the United States today, you have to know about free-speech doctrine as well: Many religious-freedom cases, including Masterpiece Cakeshop, which is currently before the Court, involve free speech as well as free exercise claims. And, in a development no one predicted a generation ago, free speech has gone from being a concern of the Left to a concern of the Right. Today, on campuses and increasingly in public life more broadly, it’s typically conservatives who insist on the right to speak, as against progressives who see free speech as a vehicle for oppression. These matters are no doubt discussed in a new book by Floyd Abrams, 
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution begins: “Congress shall make no law reflecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Taken as a whole, this statement has the aim of separating church and state, but tensions can emerge between its two elements—the so-called Nonestablishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause—and the values that lie beneath them.
high a pedestal that it is almost automatically privileged over privacy, fair trials, equality and public health, even protecting depictions of animal cruelty and violent video games sold to children. At the same time, dissent is unduly stifled and religious minorities are burdened. The First Amendment benefits the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. By contrast, other Western democracies provide more reasonable accommodations between free speech and other values though their protections of dissent, and religious minorities are also inadequate. Professor Steven H. Shiffrin argues that US free speech extremism is not the product of broad cultural factors, but rather political ideologies developed after the 1950s. He shows that conservatives and liberals have arrived at similar conclusions for different political reasons.