Around the Web

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

  • In United States v. Hari, the 8th Circuit upheld the constitutionality of 18 USC §247, which prohibits the damaging of religious real property because of the religious character of the property. The case involved an attack on the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota.
  • In Keene v. City and County of San Francisco, the 9th Circuit reversed and remanded a ruling that denied preliminary relief to city and county employees who were denied religious exemptions from San Francisco’s COVID vaccine mandate. 
  • In Williams v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago, the Northern District of Illinois denied summary judgment on an Establishment Clause challenge to a high school’s elective instruction in Transcendental Meditation .
  • In The Satanic Temple, Inc. v. City of Chicago, the Satanic Temple filed suit in the Northern District of Illinois alleging that the city’s exclusion of its clergy from delivering an invocation before Chicago City Council violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
  • The EEOC announced that it filed a Title VII religious discrimination suit in a North Carolina federal district court against a Charlotte IHOP restaurant for failing to reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious exercise. The restaurant allegedly fired an employee who refused to work on Sundays.
  • The U.S. Department of Education issued an updated Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer and Religious Expression in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools that states in part that “The Constitution does not . . . prohibit school employees themselves from engaging in private prayer during the workday where they are not acting in their official capacities and where their prayer does not result in any coercion of students.” However, “teachers, school administrators, and other school employees may not encourage or discourage private prayer or other religious activity.”

Around the Web

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

Around the Web

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

Around the Web

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

Satanists Claim Hobby Lobby Exemption from Abortion Informed-Consent Laws (via Huffington Post)

The Huffington Post reports that The Satanic Temple believes that its religious rights are infringed when its members receive anti-abortion pamphlets and information in those states that require informed consent before proceeding with an abortion. The Satanists seem to believe that they can use the Hobby Lobby decision to press their claim. You can see some of the other beliefs of the Satanists at the link.

But the informed-consent laws that the Satanists object to are state laws. This is the document that the Huffington Post pastes onto its story purporting to evidence the claim. Although it does tend to be forgotten and get lost in the nonsense (even by some Supreme Court Justices who took part in the decision), it’s important to remember that Hobby Lobby was a decision under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. RFRA applies only against the federal government. Perhaps there are some federal abortion informed-consent laws that the Satanists object to as well (though the Huffington Post did not list any of those). At any rate, RFRA won’t be of much help to the Satanists if they are objecting to state informed-consent laws.

That’s of course all before getting to the test that RFRA actually sets out, even if RFRA applied (which it doesn’t). The Satanists would need to show that the mere reception of information about abortion intended to render their consent to an abortion informed imposed a substantial burden on their religious exercise. That seems rather different to me than the threats of financial penalty imposed by the contraceptives mandate on Hobby Lobby. The Satanists would also need to counter the government’s compelling interest in ensuring that a person’s consent was indeed informed before proceeding with an abortion, as well as satisfy the least restrictive means analysis. That would be a challenging standard to meet as well.