Important New Book on the Threat to Religious Freedom Posed by Same-Sex Marriage

Rowman and Littlefield has published Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts, edited by Professor Douglas Laycock, Anthony Picarello, and Robin Fretwell Wilson. With an introduction by Picarello (General Counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) and an an afterward by Laycock (Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School), the book contains six essays on the subject.

The book arises out of a conference organized by the Becket Fund in 2005. Chapter authors include Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress, Professor Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University Law School, and Professor Chai Feldblum of Georgetown.

Much of the CLS Center's advocacy is predicated on our view that the "homosexual rights" movement poses the greatest current threat to religious freedom in the United States. This volume should help to illuminate the contours of the threat.

Prof. Douglas Laycock on the future of gay rights and religious liberties

The Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion recently posted complete transcripts of the talks delivered at its 25th anniversary conference, From Silver to Gold: The Next 25 Years of Law and Religion, held in October, 2007.

Here is an excerpt from Prof. Douglas Laycock's talk on The Future of Religious Liberty, A Conscripted Prophet’s Guesses About the Future of Religious Liberty in America. Prof. Laycock is Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Here is his glimpse of the shape of things to come:

It was the gay rights movement that rallied the broader civil rights movement to kill the proposed Religious Liberty Protection Act. That was a case where the evangelicals were willing to put much more on the bargaining table, surrender much more than the gay rights side was. The evangelicals still lost. Gay rights said we want an absolute exception or we’ll kill the bill, and they killed the bill.

So there will be gay rights laws with absurdly narrow religious exemptions, perhaps eventually with no religious exemptions at all, and there will be conservative believers who impose [sic] enactment of those laws, who resist compliance, who seek exemptions. As the gay rights movement continues to make progress, we are likely to see more and more serious religious liberty issues arising out of its success.

Federalist Society Church Autonomy Conference

The Federalist Society is sponsoring what promises to be a really terrific conference on church autonomy at Georgetown Law on March 14. Speakers include Professors Carl Esbeck and Tom Berg, both of whom advise CLS's Center for Law & Religious Freedom.

High Court Passes on Church Autonomy Case

The Supreme Court today denied cert in Petruska v. Gannon University (No. 06-985), leaving in place a correct Third Circuit opinion applying the Church Autonomy Doctrine to dismiss a sex discrimination claim against a Roman Catholic university.

One manifestation of the Church Autonomy Doctrine is Title VII's "ministerial exception." By its terms, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 exempts religious employers from its ban on religious discrimination. Above and beyond this, the courts have created the ministerial exception, which deprives the civil magistrate of the power to review a religious organization's decisions regarding clergy and their equivalents.

The first Third Circuit panel to adjudicate the case declined to embrace the ministerial exception. After the author of the majority opinion died, the court granted rehearing before a new panel. The new panel agreed with seven sister circuits and embraced the ministerial exception. It is that opinion that the Supreme Court let stand today.

The unsuccessful petitioner was represented by Prof. Marci Hamilton, author of God and the Gavel, a book deemed a "poorly executed rant" by none other than Prof. Douglas Laycock, one of the most prominent and thoughtful church-state legal academics in the country.