Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • The 4th Circuit heard oral argument in Billard v. Charlotte Catholic High School to determine whether a Catholic high school violated Title VII by firing a drama teacher for entering a same-sex marriage. While the district court sided with the teacher, during the appeal, judges inquired about the ministerial exception doctrine, even though the school had not raised it as a defense.
  • In Gardner-Alfred v. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a New York federal district court dismissed claims by two FRB employees who were denied religious exemptions from the bank’s COVID vaccine mandate. The court concluded neither employee showed objections based on sincere religious beliefs. The court noted one employee’s ties to the Temple of Healing Spirit seemed only to seek a vaccination exemption and another’s actions and associations were inconsistent with her claimed religious views.
  • In Huck v. United States, a Utah federal court dismissed challenges to Congress’ 2019 designation of public lands in Utah as wilderness areas, resulting in stricter usage rules like motor vehicle bans. Plaintiffs claimed the designation favored Earth-religions and their views on the ‘sacredness’ of lands, violating the Establishment Clause. The court emphasized historical precedent supporting federal authority over land designations and did not find evidence of religious coercion or bias against specific groups.
  • In Kloosterman v. Metropolitan Hospital, a Michigan federal district court declined to dismiss a physician assistant’s religious discrimination claims against a hospital that fired her for not referring gender transitioning patients based on religious beliefs. The plaintiff, citing Christian beliefs, argued that she was against “eras[ing] or alter[ing] one’s sex.” The court found she plausibly argued that her termination was due to religious beliefs but dismissed her free speech claim.
  • Suit was filed in Rooks v. Peoria Unified School District against the Arizona school board to defend a plaintiff’s use of Scripture during Board meeting comments. Legal counsel to the Board deemed the practice a violation of the Establishment Clause.
  • Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the government to clarify its inaction against Jerusalem’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar over derogatory remarks about Reform Judaism, the LGBTQ community, and the Women of the Wall Movement. Amar attributed earthquakes to the LGBTQ community and labeled Reform Jews as “evil people.” The petitioners claim they’ve sought government action 16 times in four years without response.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on the Founding of Israel

According to observers who know much more about the situation than I, the debate over judicial reform in Israel suggests a profound struggle over the country’s basic character as a Jewish and democratic state. Israel’s founders thought they could have it both ways–that a political religious identity could exist together with secular pluralism in a creative tension. The events of this summer show that the balance is becoming harder. A new book from Cambridge University Press, Israel’s Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment, discusses the perhaps unsustainable vision of the people who founded the Jewish State. The authors are Neil Rogachevsky (Yeshiva University) and Don Zigler. Here is the publisher’s description:

Israel’s Declaration of Independence brings to life the debates and decisions at the founding of the state of Israel. Through a presentation of the drafts of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in English for the first time, Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler shed new light on the dilemmas of politics, diplomacy, and values faced by Israel’s leaders as they charted the path to independence and composed what became modern Israel’s most important political text. The stakes began with war, state-building, strategy, and great power politics, and ascended to matters of high principle: freedom, liberty, sovereignty, rights, and religion. Using fast-paced narration of the meetings of Israel’s leadership in April and May 1948, this volume tells the astonishing story of the drafting of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, enriching and reframing the understanding of Israel’s founding and its ideas – and tracing its legacy.

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In Carson v. Makin, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Maine’s tuition program, which pays tuition to out-of-district public or private high schools for students whose districts do not operate a high school, but which requires participating schools to be nonsectarian, violates the Free Exercise Clause. 
  • In Arkansas Times LP v. Waldrip, the Eighth Circuit upheld Arkansas’ law requiring public contracts to include a certification from the contractor that it will not boycott Israel. 
  • In In re Marriage of Olsen, a Colorado state appellate court held that the district court erred by considering a wife’s religious belief that pre-embryos are human lives when settling a dispute between a husband and wife over the disposition of their cryogenically frozen pre-embryos after their divorce. 
  • In Catholic Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi v. DeLange, the Mississippi Supreme Court held that the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine prevents Mississippi courts from adjudicating wrongful termination, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress claims brought by the former finance officer of the diocese. 
  • South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster has signed H4776, the Medical Ethics and Diversity Act. The new law provides, in part, that religiously objecting medical practitioners, healthcare institutions, and healthcare payers have the right not to participate in or pay for any health care service which violates the practitioner’s or entity’s conscience. 
  • In Yalçin v. Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights, in a Chamber Judgment, held that Turkey violated Article 9 (freedom of religion and belief) of the European Convention on Human Rights by refusing to make a room available for congregational Muslim Friday prayers at a high-security prison. 
  • France’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, held that the city of Grenoble cannot permit Muslim women to wear the full-length “burkini” bathing suit in its municipal swimming pools. The court stated that doing so would compromise principles of religious neutrality and “the equal treatment of users.” 
Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the City of Boston violated the First Amendment when it rejected an application to fly a Christian flag on one of the flagpoles in front of city hall.
  • In Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin, a D.C. federal district court refused to grant a preliminary injunction to bar discharge or other adverse action against a Navy SEAL who refuses, for religious reasons, to comply with the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
  • In Cobranchi v. City of Parkersburg, a West Virginia federal district court held that Parkersburg’s City Council violated the Establishment Clause by opening its meetings with The Lord’s Prayer.
  • In South Central Conference of Seventh Day Adventists v. Alabama High School Athletic Association, suit was filed in an Alabama federal district court by the Seventh Day Adventist Oakwood Academy after it was forced to forfeit a semifinal game in the state tournament due to observance of the sabbath.
  • In State of Louisiana v. Spell (Parish of East Baton Rouge), the Louisiana Supreme Court quashed bills of information that had been issued against a pastor, charging him with violating the government’s COVID-19 orders during the pandemic.
  • Times of Israel reported last week that the Israel Religious Action Center is suing an ultra-Orthodox Jewish news website because of its policy of digitally blurring the faces of females in news photos it posts. The news site claims it blurred the faces in order to observe religious doctrines regarding modesty.

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion stories around the web:

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Israel and the American Left: A History

Here is a new book from Stanford University Press that explores the history of the American Left’s relationship to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As everyone knows, that conflict has created real tensions in progressive politics in the US and the UK as well. The book is The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left, by historian Michael Fischbach (Randolph-Macon College). The publisher’s description follows:

The Arab-Israeli conflict constituted a serious problem for the American Left in the 1960s: pro-Palestinian activists hailed the Palestinian struggle against Israel as part of a fundamental restructuring of the global imperialist order, while pro-Israeli leftists held a less revolutionary worldview that understood Israel as a paragon of democratic socialist virtue. This intra-left debate was in part doctrinal, in part generational. But further woven into this split were sometimes agonizing questions of identity. Jews were disproportionately well-represented in the Movement, and their personal and communal lives could deeply affect their stances vis-à-vis the Middle East.

The Movement and the Middle East offers the first assessment of the controversial and ultimately debilitating role of the Arab-Israeli conflict among left-wing activists during a turbulent period of American history. Michael R. Fischbach draws on a deep well of original sources—from personal interviews to declassified FBI and CIA documents—to present a story of the left-wing responses to the question of Palestine and Israel. He shows how, as the 1970s wore on, the cleavages emerging within the American Left widened, weakening the Movement and leaving a lasting impact that still affects progressive American politics today.

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

On Christian Zionism

15966A forthcoming book from the University of Pennsylvania Press, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israel Relations, argues that Christian Zionism should not be seen primarily as an apocalyptic, Evangelical movement–the way it is often portrayed by its detractors, especially on the left. The author, Daniel Hummel (University of Wisconsin-Madison) argues that Christian Zionism is more an institutional and interreligious phenomenon. (Of course, it could be all these things simultaneously). Here’s the description from the Penn website:

Weaving together the stories of activists, American Jewish leaders, and Israeli officials in the wake of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Covenant Brothers portrays the dramatic rise of evangelical Christian Zionism as it gained prominence in American politics, Israeli diplomacy, and international relations after World War II. According to Daniel G. Hummel, conventional depictions of the Christian Zionist movement—the organized political and religious effort by conservative Protestants to support the state of Israel—focus too much on American evangelical apocalyptic fascination with the Jewish people. Hummel emphasizes instead the institutional, international, interreligious, and intergenerational efforts on the part of Christians and Jews to mobilize evangelical support for Israel.

From missionary churches in Israel to Holy Land tourism, from the Israeli government to the American Jewish Committee, and from Billy Graham’s influence on Richard Nixon to John Hagee’s courting of Donald Trump, Hummel reveals modern Christian Zionism to be an evolving and deepening collaboration between Christians and the state of Israel. He shows how influential officials in the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs and Foreign Ministry, tasked with pursuing a religious diplomacy that would enhance Israel’s standing in the Christian world, combined forces with evangelical Christians to create and organize the vast global network of Christian Zionism that exists today. He also explores evangelicalism’s embrace of Jewish concepts, motifs, and practices and its profound consequences on worshippers’ political priorities and their relationship to Israel.

Drawing on religious and government archives in the United States and Israel, Covenant Brothers reveals how an unlikely mix of Christian and Jewish leaders, state support, and transnational networks of institutions combined religion, politics, and international relations to influence U.S. foreign policy and, eventually, global geopolitics.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Kaplan, “Our American Israel”

9780674737624-lgA forthcoming book from Harvard University Press discusses America’s identification with Israel: Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, by University of Pennsylvania English professor Amy Kaplan. The author identifies several elements in post-war America that have led to the strong identification most Americans feel with the Jewish state, including the sense of biblical destiny. But Americans’ identification with Israel goes way back. American Protestantism has strongly identified with the Jews ever since the Puritans–just think of all those Old Testament names in New England. Even Thomas Jefferson wanted to make the story of the Exodus part of our national seal. Now that Israel is a nation state, the sense of common identity takes a somewhat different form, but it has been with us from the beginning. Here is the book’s description from the Harvard website:

An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time.

Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.

Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.

In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.