bigdoublezero
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As to your first paragraph, that's correct, but the less reasonable a view the less likely it is to be sincerely held.
Um, no.
As to your first paragraph, that's correct, but the less reasonable a view the less likely it is to be sincerely held.
As to your first paragraph, that's correct, but the less reasonable a view the less likely it is to be sincerely held.
Um, yes. I'm typing from a phone so I'm not going to spend hours typing this out, but, outside the mainstream religious views, this is absolutely the case. When I clerked, I saw it in prisoner cases all the time. If a prisoner claims some dietary restriction based on some religious text, courts are--rightly or wrongly--more likely to believe that than a claim that the prisoner believes that Jesus appeared to him and told him he could only eat steak.
Did he win? My judge made the clerks tour a federal prison. The one we toured had a universal (ie, for all religions) chapel for the big 3 (as if there were any Jews incarcerated in the Deep South) and a sweat lodge for the Am Indians.
The sincerely held test was a component of FE Clause jurisprudence well before RFRA. You and 923 are talking about how bad it is, but I'm still wondering what the alternative is?
When I was interning at the federal courthouse one of the other clerks was telling me about a case she worked on where a prisoner who was something like 1/16th native american was petitioning under RFRA for a sweat hut to be provided at the prison.
How sincere can you be about something when you make money from investing in something you call immoral?
You should let them know.
Seriously, I have no idea about the evidence at the lower court. I don't think a court would much care if their views were internally inconsistent on this point so long as they could offer some plausible justification for them, which would include "we think the science is clearer w/r/t IUDs." In my experience, courts don't much linger on the question of sincerity, for the precise reasons we are getting into here--at some point it overlaps into a question of reasonableness, and courts are (rightly) loathe to judge religious views by that standard.
Well, we can't have courts evaluating whether a religious view is reasonable because (1) courts are courts of law not ecclesiology and (2) church doctrine will not necessarily align with human reasoning.
What else would you suggest?
i don't pretend to be a con law scholar. I yield the field to you and numbers. I just see nothing positive, whatsoever, coming out of the continued channeling of healthcare through employers nor out of the possible opening of a Pandora's box in the Hobby Lobby case, which despite Alito's protestations to the contrary will inevitably be used to try and weaken cases like Smith to get more and more exceptions for the religious. This is not in the best interest of good governance, nor is it ultimately in the best interest of the religious themselves.
Okay, but that doesn't change my point. Is any individual from HL claiming that their religion spells out which types of birth control cause abortions?
I haven't read the briefs but I would imagine that it didn't take too much for a court to be convinced that Christianity has tenets which make abortion appear to be immoral in the eyes of a Christian. Might just be embedded in the concept of "thou shalt not kill."
Reading hobby lobby decision. It is interesting to me that the majority kind of punted on "compelling government interest." I would've told the government to eat shit in that regard, but they felt it wasn't necessary to address it (but did take 2 pages to do just that).
Other than that, learned a few things. The RFRA specifically allowing corporate exemptions (something I wasn't aware of previously) kind of hamstrung the minority from the beginning.
I always put you in the JHMD "RESPONSIBILITY AND TWO PARENT HOUSEHOLD IS THE BEST WAY" camp, which to me, would mean that contraceptives were advancing a compelling interest (i.e. providing a way for people to be responsible).
Put me in whatever camp you like. I'm no bible thumper. Compelling to me means just that- compelling. It doesn't mean, hey, it can be a good thing for somebody in this situation. By that standard, anything can be argued as compelling. Granted, I don't know what standard the courts have for determining what is compelling. It could be completely subjective, or it could be a gimme in terms of the govt's burden of proof. I did note, however, that Alito's opinion was dismissive of ambiguous claims to compelling interest before he chose to punt on the issue.