Tag Archives: supreme court

Court Rules in Favor of Sikh Hoftstra ROTC Student

Update: Frank Wolf, a former Congressman and current Wilson Chair in Religious Freedom at Baylor University, says Singh’s victory (which relied upon the Religious Freedom Restoration Act being applied to the US military) could potentially open a “new chapter for religious freedom in the military,” a sentiment echoed by A. Barton Hinkle at Reason.com.

Iknoor Singh, a Sikh student at Hofstra University, will be allowed to wear the articles of his faith in a military uniform after a Federal court ruled (PDF) the Army must accommodate his beliefs. In short,

The Court finds that defendants have failed to show that the application of the Army’s regulations to this plaintiff and the denial of the particular religious accommodation he seeks further a compelling government interest by the least restrictive means.

The finding was under the auspices of the Religious Freedom Read more

Blog: Clergy Not Required to Perform Same-Sex Marriage, Except Chaplains

Much ado was recently made about Supreme Court justices questioning whether clergy would face sanction if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. In short, the concern was dismissed out of hand.

Interestingly, Jay Bookman, blogging at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, said the same thing — but he made a significant footnote [formatting original]:

Under the First Amendment, no one, with the possible exception of military chaplains**, can ever be required by government to conduct religious services that are contrary to their faith. That’s just elementary, and while I’m no fan of Scalia, I’m still surprised to see him offering objections so ill-informed that would be better suited to an email-chain than to Supreme Court debate.

Bookman’s footnote:  Read more

Sikhs Continue Calls for Military Service

While many continue to focus on promoting “sexual liberty” within the US military — primarily open service by homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc-sexuals — few have come to the aid of Sikhs who want to serve in the US military. (Sikhs wanting to serve in the US military have received more press in India than the US.)  Sikhs seek a waiver not for behavior, but for their religious beliefs. Kamal Singh Kalsi, a Sikh who obtained an exception to the uniform policy and was allowed to serve wearing a beard and turban, recently highlighted the inability of Sikhs to serve, as well as the increasing calls for the DoD to “fix” policies that prevent them from joining:

With the support of the advocacy group The Sikh Coalition, 105 members of the House of Representatives and 15 senators sent letters to the Department of Defense urging the U.S. armed forces to modernize appearance regulations so patriotic Sikh Americans can serve the country they love while abiding by their articles of faith.

The re-write earlier this year of religious accommodation regulations in the US military would presumably have made it easier for Sikhs to obtain an exception and join while wearing the accoutrements of their faith. However, Read more

Justice Scalia Defends Religion in the Public Square

This isn’t actually news: Justice Antonin Scalia has long said nothing in the US Constitution requires the government to scrub all appearances of religion from the public square. He did put a new twist on it this time, though, essentially saying the government can favor religion over non-religion:

“I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion,” Justice Scalia said.

There is nuance to that statement. Scalia had Read more

Commentators Cite Military Chaplains after SCOTUS Prayer Case

John Ragosta, Paul Finkelman and Steven K. Green, “legal scholars and historians who participated as amicus” in the recent Greece prayer case at the Supreme Court, struggled to understand what the Supreme Court intended to mean by its ruling:

The court fails, though, to explain what this means, an issue that the dissent takes up. Should prayers occur before the public is invited into the room? Should prayers be directed only at the board? Should the members themselves take turns invoking prayers, making it clear that they are personal and not “official” prayers?

These scholars missed the obvious issue that Read more

Moore, Mohler on Prayer and the Constitution

Dr. Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Dr. Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, both recently wrote fascinating pieces on the recent Supreme Court decision permitting “sectarian” prayer before legislative bodies. While he makes many good points, Mohler astutely highlights, and Moore focused entirely upon, one point that affects even the US military: calls from some that public prayers — for example, those in front of a military formation — must be “generic.”

The second very important argument made by Justice Kennedy is even more perceptive and, in the long run, more important. He asserted that the government has no competence under the Constitution to evaluate prayers in terms of content. Specifically, he said that the Establishment Clause actually would prevent the government from determining the content of any prayer — especially in terms of some supposed standard of nonsectarianism.

Put bluntly, government has no right to declare that the only God welcome in public is a “generic God.” That is a profoundly important constitutional argument…

The US government can no more create Read more

US Government to Defend Mount Soledad Cross

The Department of Justice has said it will “strongly” defend the Mount Soledad cross (as it has said before), the subject of a continuous legal battle for more than 25 years.  The cross was ruled unconstitutional again in December 2013.

Obama administration lawyers have told the Supreme Court they will strongly defend the 29-foot-tall cross atop Mount Soledad in San Diego as a memorial to the nation’s war veterans and not an unconstitutional promotion of Christianity by the government…

The cross was aloft more 35 years before a 1989 lawsuit claimed Read more

Hobby Lobby, the American Culture, and Religious Freedom

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, writing at his Moore to the Point, referencing today’s arguments at the US Supreme Court regarding health care mandates and religious freedom, which he calls “the most important religious liberty case in a generation“:

This case isn’t about politics or culture wars. This case will set the tone for the next hundred years of church/state jurisprudence in this country. This case will tell us whether we’ve bartered away a birthright paid for with our forebears’ blood…

Our government has treated free exercise of religion as though it were a tattered house standing in the way of a government construction of a railroad; there to be bought off or plowed out of the way, in the name of progress.

The government wants us to sing from their hymn book, “Onward, Sexual Revolutionaries,” but we can’t do that. We love and respect our leaders, but when they set themselves up as overlords Read more

1 … 4 5 6 7 8 9