Recently in The Law Category

Coincidentally on Sunday, while the Dallas Morning News was calling for the end to the death penalty -- in Texas, no less -- the Cincinnati Enquirer had this excellent story explaining the politics behind who gets death and who gets life.

Texas is synonymous with capital punishment. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed 391 people. This year, 12 Texans have been executed; the other 49 states have killed a sole convicted murderer.

That's what makes this so surprising: The Dallas Morning News' editorial board has called for an end to the death penalty. Here's the explanation:

There's been a ton of talk in the past few years about the coming American theocracy, one fueled by conservative Christian support of President Bush, not of a nation where the majority of people profess to be Christians but something like a Saudi Arabia for the West.

Whether this ever could happen, I don't know. But certainly it's not going to happen any time soon. The Republicans lost Congress in November, and Bush has became a really, really lame duck. Still pundits, authors and the blogosphere find this a concern worth fretting about.

Last weekend, a "blogswarm dedicated to the separation of church and state" held the first Blog Against Theocracy, for which members were asked to write at least one blog post. This was the message that preceded the event:

The post will be against theocracy, in favor of our Constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state. But there are a LOT of issues tied to this, as is pointed out in the First Freedom First website:

No religious discrimination.
PRO End-of-Life Care (no more Terri Schiavo travesties)
Reproductive health decisions made by individuals, not religious "majorities"
Democracy not Theocracy
Academic Integrity (like, a rock is as old as it is, not as old as the Bible says)
Sound Science (good bye so-called "intelligent" design)
Respect for ALL families (based on love, not sexual orientation. Hellooooo.)
And finally,
The right to worship, OR NOT.

So take your pick and write your post(s). Really, the wider variety of topics makes it all the more interesting.

Thanks to the Dallas Morning News' religion blog for pointing this out.

The Workplace Religious Freedom Act, which would strengthen the federal requirement that employers accommodate their employees' religious beliefs and is again before Congress, has caused a rift between Jews. The measure is being supported by many Jewish organizations, from the Orthodox Union to the American Jewish Committee, but it's also being opposed by civil-liberty organizations with strong Jewish constituencies, such as the ACLU.

“This legislation, whose intent is to serve as a shield against religious discrimination, may be used by some to advance their majority religious agenda, which could result in discrimination, proselytizing or harassment,” Deborah Lauter, national civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in an e-mail to the Forward, which has a story on the split.

The bill plays into a growing push by people wanting to better incorporate faith in the workplace. Advocates say that it is not about proselytizing others but about decompartamentalizing their own lives. The Workplace Religious Freedom Act was introduced in Congress more than a decade ago, but is now enjoying broader religious support. The Forward story has the background.

It's really a philosophical query, one reporters aren't well-suited or aptly trained to answer. But the current case of Temple 420, a Hollywood congregation that reads the Bible and smokes marijuana to communicate with God, is begging the question.

The Rev. Craig X Rubin, a minister ordained by the interfaith Universal Life Church and founder of the temple, sued the LAPD for $30 million Wednesday, claiming his religious and civil rights were violated when narc officers raided his sanctuary/head shop in November and purportedly told him it was not a "real religion."

But what is a real religion?

"There is no standard in nature to which one can go to decide if a group is a 'real' religion," says Dan Olson, chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Indiana University South Bend. "It all depends on whether people in the society that they are part of are convinced they are a religion. When different parts of society don't agree, like so many other things in life it often comes down to the group that has the most influence and power to determine whether the group will be persecuted and harassed or given respect and resources by others in society.

"Almost every accepted religion today has historical roots in some group that either broke away from a major religion (and was thus considered a heretical sect -- Christianity started as a sect of Judaism) or started from scratch with the vision or innovation of a prophet/visionary/founder who was probably seen as a kook or a dangerous heretic by most people in his/her day."

The role religions serve in society also complicate our understanding of what is sincere or genuine and what is "fake."

"You have to give people a feeling or a sense of the sacred and then you have to bond them in community," Robert C. Fuller, a religion professor at Bradley University in Illinois and author of Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History, told me. "The fact of the matter is anything that helps with those two function has religious values."

Last summer, a month before Rubin opened Temple 420, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine reported that Timothy Leary was correct: Hallucinogens do enhance spiritual experiences. One third of the 60 percent of study participants who reported a "full mystical experience" described it as the most significant spiritual event of their lives.

Does that mean smoking pot -- whether it comes from what Rubin believes is the tree of life written of in Genesis or just a weed -- has religious value? Rastafarians use it, and the courts have ruled in their favor for consumption, though not transportation and distribution.

For Rubin, who is charged with two felony drug counts, and his followers, an LA Superior Court Judge will have to decide.

It was branded as a case of sleeping with the enemy: Conservative Christians and civil libertarians – groups at war almost incessantly over the teaching of evolution in school, public prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, crosses on public lands and a multitude of other issues – both support “Bong Hits 4 Jesus"

The case, heard yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court, involves an Alaskan high schooler who cut class to stand on the street as an Olympic torch runner passed and held aloft the “Bong Hits” sign. After the student was suspended for exercising free speech, his defense did not rest solely on the “secular humanists” who so often defend the Constitution, but also came from the conservative Christians who most certainly don't believe Jesus would be encouraged by ganja-induced stupors in his name.

“'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' Case Finds Strange Legal Bedfellows” was the headline from Religion News Service, posted on Beliefnet.com. And that is the temptation – to think civil libertarians and biblical literalists never cozy up together.

In fact, the groups are not so monogamous.

Two years ago, Christians and the ACLU – and dozens of other religious groups and civil-liberty organizations – lobbied the Supreme Court in favor of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a 7-year-old federal law aimed at protecting religious minorities in land-use disputes and religious freedom for prisoners. Last year, Christians and friends joined the ACLU in supporting a small religious group that used peyote in its services.

“There is a pretty well standing tradition of various religious denominations banding together and filing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court regardless of the practice at issue,” said Gene K. Schaerr, who represented 17 religious organizations, including the National Association of Evangelicals, the Baptist Joint Committee, the First Church of Christ Scientist, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Sikh Coalition and the Muslim Minaret of Freedom Institute, in a friend of the court brief supporting the religious sect, O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal.

"It was an amazingly broad coalition of everything from very conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics to the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State."