Religion in Public Places

An unsettled question in the law of limited purpose public forums is whether forums that are made available for broad purposes can exclude religious worship. In a trio of cases culminating in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the Supreme Court has made clear that religious uses that are within a forum’s purpose cannot be excluded because they are religious. Thus, the Milford school, having decided to make its facilities broadly available for after hours community use, could not exclude the Good News Club, an evangelical Christian group who wished to conduct bible study and related activities for children.

Some have read Good News Club (incorrectly in my view) to recognize a distinction between worship and other forms of religious uses. In this paper (forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Journal), I draw on the theology of Christian worship (which I think broadly applies to many other religious traditions) to argue that worship, while sometimes seen as noncommunicative and deliberative, is, in fact, both and ought not to be excluded from broadly defined forums.

Here’s a related question.

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I Refer to the Woman with Whom You Have a Child But Who Is Not Your Wife (Hereafter “Baby Mama”)

Perhaps Professor O’Hear can straighten me out on this.

The decision of a divided Court of Appeals setting aside the sentence of Landray Harris has gotten a fair amount of play in the blogs and on talk radio. Put briefly, the court vacated the sentence because the sentencing judge, apparently frustrated by the defendant’s failure to get a job, referred to the defendant’s “baby mama” (who supports him) and wondered how “you guys” (referring to one out of four defendants who appeared before the court) find women who are willing to support them in idleness. One of the area’s most prominent African-American defense attorneys has come to the defense of the sentencing judge, suggesting that his comments grew out of conversations that they had over the years about the puzzling ability of ne’er-do-wells to find women who enable them.

MULS alum Tom Foley is derisive of the critics, suggesting that they have failed to understand the proper standard for evaluating such matters. He points out that the majority asked whether the sentencing remarks could suggest to a reasonable observer or a “reasonable person in the position of the defendant that the court was improperly considering Harris’s race?” Thus, Tom argues, the question to be answered is not what, say, Jeff Wagner would make of the judge’s remarks but how they would be perceived by an African-American defendant.

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Taking Oaths Seriously

 

Most presidents take the oath of office twice in their lives only if reelected.  Yesterday night, Barack Obama took the oath – again –  from Chief Justice John Roberts because of the miscues during the inauguration ceremony the day before.  The media’s take, thus far, is to poke fun at what is called the “do over,” the “flub heard around the world,” (MSNBC) and the “oaf of office” (courtesy of the New York Post).  Yet at the same time, we are assured that Obama’s first oath was essentially good enough or perhaps even unnecessary for him to assume the presidency because the new term began at noon on January 20, 2009 regardless.  Yale’s Akhil Amar obligingly opined on NBC that the second oath was akin to “wearing both a belt and suspenders.” 

Personally, I’d find it somewhat unsettling if Obama began wearing a belt along with suspenders, so I think it is worth our time to take seriously an event that obviously the President and the Chief Justice took quite seriously.   I am very much impressed that Obama and Roberts thought the oath significant enough to warrant the second ceremony.  Clearly it was not done to deflect the embarrassment of the day before; indeed, the second oath only underscored their abject failure to recite correctly the 35 word oath – hardly a pas de deux.  I also doubt that either Obama or Roberts fretted about the legality of the inauguration ceremony; the second oath was not intended to avoid crack pot law suits.  

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