Top Ten Religion Stories of 2009.

From Religion Clause comes this list, below. See the bottom paragraph of Howard Freidman's post for two more lists:

Top 10 Church-State, Religious Liberty Developments In 2009

Here are my nominations for the 2009 Top Ten Developments in Church-State Separation/ Free-Exercise of Religion. The choices are based on the long-range implications of the developments on legal doctrines and on future of relations between government and religion. Some of this year's top picks continue trends selected last year. (2008 Top 10.) Others reflect new concerns. I am sure that some readers will disagree with the picks, so I invite your comments. Most of these developments were reflected in a number of Religion Clause postings over the year. Links are to representative posts on the issue.

1. U.S. Catholic bishops are at increasing odds with President Obama over abortion. Very public disputes, sometimes splitting the Catholic community, erupted over Notre Dame's award of an honorary degree to Obama and over the USCCB's insistence on strict language in health care reform bills to limit abortion coverage.

2. Conservative Christian groups mount extensive but unsuccessful attempt to prevent passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

3. The Freedom From Religion Foundation becomes a major player in pressing for church-state separation by challenging a wide variety of practices, from sectarian prayers at city council meetings, to the tax code's parsonage allowance, to engravings at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

4. The Rifqa Bary case requires Florida and Ohio courts to become involved in run-away teenager's claim that her Muslim father threatens her life because of her conversion to Christianity.

5. U.S. Supreme Court rules that a Utah city can refuse to allow the religious group, Summum, to put up a monument containing its "Seven Aphorisms" in a public park, even though a 10 Commandments monument and other monuments are already there.

6. Britain's new Supreme Court holds that a Jewish school's admissions policy using the traditional Orthodox definition of who is a Jew amounts to ethnic, and therefore racial, discrimination.

7. Courts around the country decide disputes over ownership of property after numerous conservative Episcopal parishes move to Anglican affiliations.

8. South Carolina's attempt to issue state-sponsored "I Believe" license plates is ruled a violation of the Establishment Clause.

9. France convicts Scientology and its leaders of fraud while German court limits tactics of German government against Scientology.

10. A Utah trial court rejects a settlement proposed by Utah's Attorney General in the complicated attempt to reform the FLDS United Effort Plan Trust, while the estate of a deceased leader of the polygamous FLDS Church seeks control of the $120 million trust.

There are at least two other Top 10 lists published this month on religion related stories. You may find it interesting to compare their picks, many of which differ a good deal from mine, though they were using somewhat different criteria. They are Don Byrds' Top 10 Religious Liberty Stories of 2009; and Religion Newswriters Top 10 Religion Stories.

How New Mexico's Human Rights Act Can Work.

From Religion Clause, an odd, contested case in New Mexico, below. Shows you what I know: I never expected that the court could require a person to serve, to photograph (in this case), a job she didn't want to. For more on New Mexico's Human Rights Act, see here. And the Religious Freedom Restoration Act here.

This case reminds me of the issue with Bob Jones University's prevention of integration and interracial dating, the latter of which was outlawed on campus until the late date of 1983. Although the business mentioned below, I assume, doesn't receive federal funds, the University did. What makes me make the connection is the use of religious grounds to justify discrimination. And if New Mexico is intolerant of religious discrimination, has the law been applied to women's reproductive rights and Catholic hospitals?

There is a hospital merger case that comes to mind. For two years, community members and advocates from Women's Law Center and The MergerWatch Project fought to guarantee that the merger did not end delivery of women's reproductive services. You can google St. Vincent's and New Mexico and read more about the story. (Note to self: learn more about New Mexico politics!)

In Elane Photography, LLC v. Willock, (NM Dist. Ct., Dec. 11, 2009), a New Mexico trial court held that a limited liability company owned by a husband and wife and operating a photography business violated New Mexico's Human Rights Actwhen owner-photographer Elaine Huguenin refused to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. Upholding finding by the state's Human Rights Commission (see prior posting), the court concluded that the company was a public accommodation that discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. It held that application of the HRA did not violate Huguenin's freedom of expression because she is merely a conduit for her client's message in the photos. Huguenin had argued that enforcement of the HRA here forced her to convey a message that a marital relationship can exist between two individuals of the same sex.

The court also concluded that enforcement did not infringe Hugenin's free exercise of religion. Huguenin argued that this forced her to attend a religious ceremony that violates her conscience. The court held however that the HRA is a neutral law of general applicability. Finally the court rejected a claim under the New Mexico Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Alliance Defense Fund announced yesterday that it will appeal the decision.

We Own The Poor and Infirm: They are Most Susceptible to Our Beliefs.

Because Catholic and other churches have long claimed represent and care for the "least of these," westernized governments around the world have allowed them to speak for the mentally ill, the poor, and minorities. It's old turf for religion to claim compassion in the face of infirmity.

From The Catholic Herald, a bishop addresses the British government's necessary review of the existing suicide laws to comply with the summer's decision in the Debbie Purdy case, asserting that the church knows what's best for the suffering:

They said Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), was creating categories of people whose lives would be legally considered less worthy of protection than those of others in society.

The bishops said his interim policy for prosecutors in cases of assisted suicide stigmatised the disabled and the mentally and terminally ill and could send out the message that it was acceptable to help such people to kill themselves.

Mr Starmer was exceeding his powers by ignoring the will of Parliament, they said, which has rejected two attempts in the last 18 months to change the law on assisted suicide and euthanasia.

"A sick or disabled person's life should merit the same degree of protection by law," said the bishops in a submission to the public consultation into the draft proposals, which they made public on Friday last week.

But often these religious bodies are not working to raise up the poor, ill, and infirm to be equal members of society. They are counting on them to be forced, by need, to comply with church doctrine, to become believers. Suffering has long been the door through which faith walks. Fox holes, hospital beds, and gutters have long been better than pulpits for winning hearts to God. Find a man who's hungry and you find a desperate soul willing to barter his faith for bread. Find an ill child and you get a believer in gratitude for healing medication.

For example, take the Christianization of Africa during and after colonialism. US and European churches sent millions of missionaries to the continent who offered westernized medicine, materials, food, and support in exchange for belief in God, capitalizing on those with nothing to lose to expand church influence and membership. Giant swaths of the continent were paternalized by the church. And the local governments were not about to stop the influx of aid, often because it came with hefty pay-outs and protection of rulership.

To me this is the great lie of missionary work, both here and abroad. After all, the same case is made again and again these past weeks in the US and Britain regarding Catholic hospitals and the so-called conscience clause and end of life choice. While studies show that these entities do no more charity work than other non-profit or public hospitals, they have long claimed to speak for the least of society. Want to stop provider refusal of services at Catholic hospitals and we will pull out of health care, they say. We are the church and we don't compromise for patients' rights.

Aid in Dying and the Manhattan Declaration.

I've culled the Manhattan Declaration for language on aid in dying - so you won't have to! Excerpts below.

(I'd like to note, by the way, that as I write, the Declaration has about 6,000 signatures.)

Because the "slippery slope" argument allows that legalization of "euthanasia" occurred because of the legalization of abortion and the rise of the "culture of death," often "sanctity of life" language includes both abortion and aid in dying.

And a snide aside: I find the "render unto Caesar" stuff really tacky. These organizations use the first amendment to provide social services to the public, all the while enjoying tax exemptions and suckling at the federal government's teet to the tune of 50% of their hospital budgets. (See my prior post for a quote about tax evasion "civil disobedience.")

A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are discardable. As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began with abortion has now metastasized. For example, human embryo-destructive research and its public funding are promoted in the name of science and in the cause of developing treatments and cures for diseases and injuries. The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo- research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called “therapeutic cloning.” This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues. At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and “voluntary” euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons. Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of “liberty,” “autonomy,” and “choice.”

We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion. We will work, as we have always worked, to bring assistance, comfort, and care topregnant women in need and to those who have been victimized by abortion, even as we stand resolutely against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can somehow be in the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate killing of their unborn children. Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for mother and child alike.

A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of government: to protect the weak and vulnerable against violent attack, and to do so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination. The Bible enjoins us to defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot themselves speak. And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and the dependent. What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make clear. We must be willing to defend, even at risk and cost to ourselves and our institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development and in every condition.

Our concern is not confined to our own nation. Around the globe, we are witnessing cases of genocide and “ethnic cleansing,” the failure to assist those who are suffering as innocent victims of war, the neglect and abuse of children, the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and young women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and the failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS. We see these travesties as flowing from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion industry and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for biomedical research. And so ours is, as it must be, a truly consistent ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances.

And the most oft quoted paragraph:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

Need Something to Read?

From ReligionClause, a list of new books and articles:

From SSRN:

• Victor C. Romero, Of Hope and Humility: Christian Realism, Immigration Reform and Executive Leadership, (Penn State Legal Studies Research Paper No. 17-2009, Oct. 23, 2009).
• Ira C. Lupu & Robert W. Tuttle, Same-Sex Family Equality and Religious Freedom, (Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy, Forthcoming).
• Eric G. Andersen, Religion and Social Welfare in the United States: The Case of Charitable Choice, (The Review of Faith & International Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2009).

From SmartCILP and elsewhere:

• Barbara Shapiro, Changing Language, Unchanging Standard: From 'Satisfied Conscience' to 'Moral Certainty' and Beyond 'Reasonable Doubt', 17 Cardozo Journal of International & Comparative Law 261-279 (2009).
• Barbara E. Wall, Ethical Considerations for a New Jurisprudence: A Catholic Social Thought Perspective, 11 Barry Law Review 77-93 (2008).
• Samuel W. Calhoun, Getting the Framers Wrong: A Response to Professor Geoffrey Stone, 57 UCLA Law Review Discourse 1 (2009).
• Geoffrey R. Stone, The Perils of Religious Passion: A Response to Professor Samuel Calhoun, 57 UCLA Law Review Discourse 15 (2009).

Recent Books:

• Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, (Harvard University Press, May 2009).
• Amos Guiora, Freedom from Religion, (Oxford University Press, Oct. 2009).
• Vincent Phillip Muñoz, God and the Founders - Madison, Washington, and Jefferson, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), reviewed by South Bend Tribune.