by Many religious commentators on the CLS v. Martinez case are upset by the majority’s rejection of the argument that discrimination based on conduct differs from discrimination based on status. Some religious conservatives are keen to promote such a distinction because it would help immunize discrimination based on sexual conduct from strict constitutional scrutiny. For example, [...]
Read the full postMonthly Archive for June, 2010
by Today’s Martinez decision has provoked debate about whether Hastings’ “all comers” policy (if that’s what the school’s policy actually was) was “viewpoint neutral.” Five Justices said yes; four Justices said no. On this blog, Bob Cochran agrees with the four. For what it’s worth, so do I. But the difficulty and the confusion arise in [...]
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by I see that David and Rob have already made thoughtful posts about CLS v. Martinez. I would like to raise a few more issues related to the opinion. The first issue concerns Justice Ginsburg’s statement that the Hastings “all comers” policy is content neutral. This seems to me to be clearly wrong. The policy prefers broad, [...]
Read the full postToday the Supreme Court released its opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. If you have heard about this case from the press or from an advocacy group and are concerned about it, I’d encourage you to read the entire opinion as well as the concurrence and dissent. The whole package is ugly, I think. [...]
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by I was disappointed by today’s ruling in CLS v. Martinez, a case that is an important entry in our legal system’s ongoing struggle to navigate through the tricky waters of associational freedom, government “speech,” and religious/moral pluralism. Four quick points about the reasoning employed by Justices Ginsburg (for the majority) and Stevens (concurring):
Read the full postThis isn’t really a “Law”-related post, but I found it so inspiring I had to pass it on, and it does relate to the broader theme of faith and culture. There is a great piece in WSJ on Manute Bol’s Christian faith. Bol was a professional basketball player, who was known more for his size [...]
Read the full postWe generally think of theological translation issues as obscure questions, battled out in seminaries and divinity school ivory towers, with little relevance for the day-to-day lives of believers. Thankfully, it appears that Christians can rely on most of most of the modern English translations of the Bible. But the (mis-?) translation of one word in English versions of the Bible may have mis-directed generations of Christians about one of the most significant issues in the Christian life.
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by On a recent plane trip, I read Gilbert Meileander’s Neither Beast Nor God (buy it here), which is a succinct examination of the ideas of human and personal “dignity.” He writes (among other things): I doubt whether we can understand dignity well without at least a modest anthropology — without some notion of what it [...]
Read the full postI have never done scholarly work on the issue of same-sex marriage, but I occasionally read work on the subject, in part because it intersects in contested ways with the subject of religious freedom, which is an area in which I work. The most common description of what is being sought and resisted, it seems, [...]
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by “Woe to you [lawyers], because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your forefathers did; they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs.” –Luke 11:47-48 I found myself recalling this perplexing and troubling statement last week when, in the [...]
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