Opponents of Proposition 8 have put up a map purporting to show where donors to the “Yes on 8” campaign live. You can get the name, occupation, and amounts of donation for each mapped donor. While you can’t get the exact address, it would be quite easy to use the map to find the homes of donors.
The information used to create the map is all publicly available, but it does make it more accessible and convenient to use. But for what end?
In the fall issue of the Marquette Law Review, Professor Nantiya Ruan of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law has written an interesting article entitled “Accommodating Respectful Religious Expression in the Workplace.” It is always hard to summarize a serious piece of scholarship in the few sentences that a blog post will permit and I am, of course, likely to emphasize those aspects of the piece that I found intriguing. It is also true, since I have decided to post a response and not a blurb, that I will emphasize those things that I see differently. So, with advance apologies to Professor Ruan, here is how I read the article.
Ruan posits an inconsistency between the emerging willingness of the Supreme Court to protect religious expression in public spaces (as illustrated by the Ten Commandments cases of 2005) and its rather narrow reading of the requirements to accommodate religious expression in the workplace under Title VII, where employers need incur no more than a de minimis burden to accommodate religious expression and practice.
I am sympathetic to Ruan’s arguments for greater accommodation of religious expression in the workplace. She does a nice job of advancing the notion that religion is fundamental to individual identity, although I would have added, as I have in recent papers, the notion that mandated secular spaces harm religion.
But I want to comment on her claim of an inconsistency between the recent trend toward toleration of religion in the public square and the treatment of religion in the workplace.
I wanted to comment briefly on one of the cases recently accepted by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, as reported here by Jessica Slavin.
In State v. Welda, the court will consider the application of the hate crime penalty enhancer set forth in § 939.645(1) providing for increased penalties where the state can prove that a defendant “[i]ntentionally select[ed] the person against whom the crime . . . is committed . . . in whole or in part because of the actor’s belief or perception regarding the race . . . of that person . . . .”
Without getting into the distasteful detail, the defendants were convicted of disorderly conduct arising out of what seems to be an argument with some African-American passers-by who objected to the defendants’ repeated use of the n-word.
There are some not very interesting (and not particularly powerful) arguments that the comments were not directed to the African-American complainants.
But there are three things that I think merit comment.