Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Good and Bad at the UN

Last Thursday, I attended a meeting of the UN General Assembly’s Social, Humanitarian & Cultural Committee – the so-called “Third Committee” – for presentation of the annual report of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Professor Heiner Beilefeldt. (Earlier in the day, CLR had co-hosted a briefing with Beilefeldt). It was an interesting experience.

Professor Beilefeldt is a serious, energetic, and well-motivated scholar, and his report, which focuses on protecting the right of conversion in international human rights law, is worth reading. In some respects, the Committee meeting was worthwhile, too. The Third Committee is a huge body, with delegates from all UN member states; it meets in an oversized room that feels like a repurposed Costco. There is a platform at the front, where the Chair and Special Rapporteur sit, and rows and rows of tables with delegates and staff. The Special Rapporteur presents a summary of his report, and delegates are then allowed to respond and ask questions, which they do in the studied, affectless monotone of diplomatic conferences.

About a dozen state delegations responded to Professor Beilefeldt’s report. Some interventions were revealing. For example, Germany and the Netherlands stressed the need for protecting atheism as a belief. The Canadian and Chinese delegates got into a dustup over whether Falun Gong is a religion or a cult; the Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Tragedy of Religious Freedom — HUP page is up

Just wanted to alert CLR Forum readers that HUP’s page for my book is now up (I’m sure you were all waiting with bated breath).  The process of negotiation over both title and cover art was a very pleasant one, and interesting to go through for the first time from my perspective.  Not that readers can get the book yet, even if they so desired.  But you can be sure that I will prime the pump at each stage of the production!!  In fact, I’m afraid you will all have to suffer through some rank self-promotion over the next few months, so my apologies in advance.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 2 Comments

Panel: Careers in Law and Religion

CLR will host a panel, “Careers in Law and Religion,” at the Law School on Tuesday, October 23, from 5:30-7:30 pm. The panel, which is co-sponsored by the St. John’s Career Development Office, will bring together lawyers from a variety of practices — government, firms, NGOs, and religious tribunals — to discuss how their work implicates the growing field of law religion. Panelists include Elizabeth Cassidy (US Commission on International Religious Freedom), Peter Johnson, Jr. (Leahey & Johnson), Maureen Liccione (Jaspan Schlesinger), Keith Sharfman (St. John’s), Amardeep Singh (Sikh Coalition), and Diana Verm (Becket Fund). Details are here.

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Inazu on the Future of Religious Liberty

John D. Inazu (Washington University School of Law) has posted The Four Freedoms and the Future of Religious Liberty. The abstract follows.

The First Amendment’s rights of speech, press, religion, and assembly were once “interwoven” but distinct. Together, these freedoms advanced a pluralist skepticism of state orthodoxy that protected religious and other forms of liberty. The connections among these rights were evident at the Framing. They were also prominent during the 1930s and 1940s, when legal and political rhetoric recognized the “preferred position” of the “Four Freedoms.” We have lost sight of the Four Freedoms, supplanting their unified distinctiveness with an undifferentiated free speech framework driven by unsatisfying concepts like content neutrality and public forum analysis. It did not have to be this way, and it may not be too late to change course. This Article seeks to renew the pluralist emphasis once represented by the Four Freedoms.

The consequences of losing the pluralist vision are nowhere more evident than in the diminishing constitutional protections for religious groups, which are paradigmatic of the expressive, dissenting, and culture-forming groups of civil society. The Four Freedoms remind us that the boundaries of religious liberty have never rested solely in the First Amendment’s free exercise clause — religious liberty is best strengthened by ensuring robust protections of more general forms of liberty. But the normative effort to reclaim pluralism is not without costs, and it confronts powerful objections from anti-discrimination norms pertaining to race, gender, and sexual orientation — objections that cannot go unanswered.

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Esbeck on Religion During the American Revolution

Carl H. Esbeck (University of Missouri School of Law) has posted Religion During the American Revolution and the Early Republic.  The abstract follows.

This paper is part of an anthology and will appear in volume one under the heading Historical Introduction to Law and Religion in the West. The editor requested an extended essay concerning religion and religious liberty in the American War of Independence and its aftermath. The paper is juxtaposed with another on the French Revolution, providing a comparison for the role religion played in these events that continue to shape the world. In addition to the War itself, which unfolded over 1775-1783, changes within American Protestantism had a leveling effect on society and, by the early years of the republic, the political and religious culture exalted liberty, individualism, and the voluntary church.

The Quebec Act of 1774 illustrates the degree to which American patriots reacted against Roman Catholicism. This act of Parliament preserved the established role of the Catholic Church in French Canada, including public funding and full sanction by the British government. British tolerance of the Catholic establishment drew harsh protests from Congress, even mention as a grievance in the Declaration of Independence. American sensitivity was to Old World political uses of religion. The patriots believed that a fully-empowered Catholic hierarchy to the north and west of them would bring Old World intrigues involving the Roman Church. To be an American was to be in sympathy with Protestantism, to be Protestant was to be republican, and to be republican was to oppose Catholic absolutism. Moreover, the British were departing from their constitutional commitment to representative government when they unilaterally imposed taxes and other oppressive acts on colonial subjects. This was seen as an offense to republicanism and each American’s inalienable rights. The breach of the Lockean social contract legitimated armed rebellion. Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

CLR Fellow Andrew Hamilton Wins Writing Prize

We are proud to announce that one of our talented student fellows, Andrew Hamilton, has won third place in the national “Religious Freedom Student Writing Competition,” sponsored by the Washington D.C. Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society and the International Center for Law and Religion Studies.  Andy’s paper, The New York Marriage Equality Act and the Strength of its Religious Exceptions (supervised by Mark), explores whether the religious exceptions under the New York same-sex marriage law allow Catholic Charities to refuse to place foster children with same-sex couples.

The paper will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies.  Andrew will be traveling down to Washington D.C. this Thursday to attend the  2012 International Religious Liberty Award Dinner, whose guest of honor is Douglas Laycock.

Warm congratulations to Andy!

Posted on by JCPW

Harris, “The Serpentine Wall: The Winding Boundary between Church and State in the United States”

This January, Transaction Publishers will publish The Serpentine Wall: The Winding Boundary between Church and State in the United States by James F. Harris (College of William and Mary). The publisher’s description follows.

The Serpentine Wall is chronologically structured, befitting a history of church-state separation in the United States. It begins with a history of ideas approach to the European backgrounds and colonial American experiments in theocracy and freedom of religion. It covers pre-modern American debates about religious freedom among the founding generation right up through the nineteenth century. The final section of the book focuses on the separation of church and state and how this has become a matter determined by the Supreme Court.

The resolution of the proper interpretation of the religious clauses of the First Amendment and the course of the boundary between church and state has been slow. Many changes that took place throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century have influenced the increasingly circuitous route taken by the Serpentine Wall between the two. The result has been an increased focus on social issues involving questions of interpretation of the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment.

The founding of the United States was a unique event in human history and the result of factors that are unlikely to be repeated. To understand the founding of a democratic country with a unique arrangement between church and state, it is important to view that development as both a product of and a departure from what had come before. Harris’ interesting, unique, philosophical viewpoint will be important to those interested in how the roles of church versus state have evolved in the United States.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Today at St. John’s: Manhattan Declaration Panel

Today at St. John’s, the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn will host a panel discussion, “The Manhattan Declaration Crosses the River: Support the Preservation of Religious Liberty.” Speakers include Marjorie Dannenfelser (Susan B. Anthony List), Robert George (Princeton), Alan Sears (ADF), and Eric Teetsel (Manhattan Declaration). Details are here.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 2 Comments

Rights and Judgment

This story reports that the Obama Administration has issued a statement questioning the “judgment” of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in publishing insulting pictures of the Prophet Mohammed (discussed by Mark immediately below).  The Administration — through its “porte-parole” Jay Carney — was careful to distinguish the issue of the magazine’s constitutional “right” to publish the pictures and its judgment in doing so because the Administration “know[s] that these images will be very shocking for many people,” and “might provoke violent reactions.”

The reaction of the Administration reminds me very much of the controversy over the construction of the so-called September 11 mosque in New York City.  I recall distinctly that the position of some at the time was that though there was and surely should be no legal barrier to the use of particular property vaguely proximate to the site of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, it would be unwise, or evince a lack of good judgment, for the rights-holders to exercise their rights.  I recall the cute statement, made somewhere by someone, that it is “not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.”  I also remember that the President came out at first quite strongly in support of the mosque and cultural center (as did Mayor Michael Bloomberg), but then backed off a bit when the issue was put not in terms of rights, but of judgment: ““I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” the President said. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.” 

How about it readers?  Are the situations formally identical (with the exception that the President has commented negatively on the wisdom of publishing the cartoons, while he declined to do so with respect to the Ground Zero mosque)?  If so, are there nevertheless other salient differences between them?  Are there categorical differences, for example, between the wisdom of exercising a speech right and the wisdom of exercising the freedom of religion?

Posted on by ddrakeman

Things I Thought I Knew — Part 2: The Simple Cobbler from Connecticut

American statesman Roger Sherman is best known to us for not being very well known.  We find him mostly in collections of works by “Forgotten Framers.”  Or, for those of us raised in the era of the Broadway play and film, 1776,  he is “just a simple cobbler from Connecticut,” whose intellect isn’t up to helping draft the Declaration of Independence.

Mark David Hall’s excellent new book, Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (2012), shows us what we’ve been missing by focusing too much attention on the more famous founders.  Hardly just a simple merchant, Sherman was smart, articulate and thoughtful, and he was a deeply religious and intellectually engaged Calvinist in the New England tradition. Sherman’s Reformed Protestant faith was not only important to him, but, thanks to Sherman and his New England colleagues, it ended up contributing as much to American nation-building as the much more commonly credited Enlightenment.

Meanwhile, the original “simple cobbler” from New England is always worth revisiting.  Nathaniel Ward was a Puritan minister who wrote, under a pseudonym, a satiric 1646 essay titled, “The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America.”  The Simple Cobbler sets out a New England view of religious toleration not long after Roger Williams was banished, as follows:   “Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better.”

Don Drakeman