Jewish organizations hope that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to rule on the validity of a city ordinance banning animal sacrifice will set limits on governmental interference with religious practices.
In particular, the Jewish organizations would like to see the court clarify its 1990 ruling that the First Amendment did not prevent the state of Oregon from enforcing a drug abuse law against American Indians who use the hallucinogen peyote in religious services.
The 5-4 decision in Employment Division vs. Smith, known as the peyote case, was condemned by Jewish religious and secular organizations and a broad cross-section of Christian religious groups as destroying the protection of the First Amendment clause guaranteeing free exercise of religion.
Jewish organizations are now considering joining the case accepted by the court this week, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye vs. City of Hialeah, by filing briefs against the ban on animal sacrifice imposed by the City Council of Hialeah, Fla.
The ban was aimed at a group of followers of Santeria, an African religion that goes back some 4,000 years and is practiced by thousands of Cuban immigrants to the United States.
Hialeah enacted the ban when the group leased a used-car lot to build a church where they planned to sacrifice chickens, ducks, goats, pigeons, sheep and turtles.
In the peyote case, the Oregon law was not targeted at a specific religion, but was an anti-drug law, said Samuel Rabinove, legal director for the American Jewish Committee. The Hialeah law was aimed at a specific religious practice.
COURT LINEUP HARD TO PREDICT
Jewish organizations would like to see the court make “neutrality” a serious test, said Marc Stern, co-director of the American Jewish Congress Commission on Law and Social Action.
While sharing the hope that the court will narrow the scope of the peyote ruling, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America is concerned that the ruling could become more strict and allow the ban of kosher slaughter, said William Rapfogel, executive director of the group’s Institute for Public Affairs.
The Florida law permits kosher slaughter.
The Hialeah ordinance was upheld by U.S. District Judge Eugene Spellman in Miami, on the grounds that it was aimed at “conduct” rather than “belief.” His decision came before the Supreme Court’s ruling in the peyote case.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld Spellman’s ruling after the peyote decision, but without reference to it.
The major objection that Jewish and other groups had to the peyote decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, was that it eliminated the need to demonstrate a “compelling state interest” if a law prohibited a religious practice, as long as the law did not single out the religious practice.
In a strong dissenting opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that eliminating the compelling-interest test was “incompatible with our nation’s fundamental commitment to individual religious liberty.”
A wall-to-wall coalition of Jewish, Christian and civil rights groups have supported a bill that would restore the compelling-interest test. But the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, introduced by Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.), has been held up by some opponents of abortion, who fear it would be used to bar states from restricting abortions on religious grounds.
The Jewish legal experts said they could not guess how the court would rule in the Florida case. Scalia and the other four justices in the majority opinion in the peyote case are still on the court. Two of the dissenters, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, have since retired.
They have been replaced by Justices David Souter and Clarence Thomas, who said at their confirmation hearings they agreed with O’Connor.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
