So yesterday, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that religious accommodations do not violate the Constitution's prohibition of government endorsement of religion. This was the result of a bunch of lawsuits from prison inmates in Ohio, all of whom are of non-mainstream religions, who claimed that prison officials weren't accommodating their desires for religious services and other such things particular to their own faiths. But existing law was what made this form of discrimination possible.
As The Christian Science Monitor put it: "At issue before the court was whether special accommodations to facilitate worship by adherents of minority religions in prison violates the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Critics of the law - which is called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) - say that granting certain benefits to religious individuals that are not also granted to the nonreligious violates requirements that the government remain strictly neutral in matters of faith. The court unanimously rejected this view."
And well they should have. Now, you might be able to understand the concern of the Department of Corrections. After all, things are different in prison than in open society. In the Big House, any special privileges given to some inmates can piss off the other inmates, and make them demand the same privileges, whether or not they're really "deserving" of them. What, someone fake being religious, just to get the benefits? Naw, that doesn't happen, does it?
Well, it does happen, but that's just part of the package. You can't have a litmus test for religiosity, for who does and does not believe "enough" to qualify. Not unless you can read minds, anyway.
But getting back to the court's decision, some time ago, the Sixth Circuit insisted that "The primary effect of RLUIPA is not simply to accommodate the exercise of religion by individual prisoners, but to advance religion generally by giving religious prisoners rights superior to those of nonreligious prisoners." The Supreme Court disagrees. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said, by the Sixth Circuit's logic, "all manner of religious accommodations would fall," and "Congressional permission for members of the military to wear religious apparel while in uniform would fail."
What Ginsberg is getting at is the long-standing disparity between the First Amendment's two clauses: the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. These are two sides of the same coin, really, but obviously, there will always be occasions where the question of which is more important will come up.
But the important thing to remember is that there's more to "an establishment of religion" than just providing accommodations for worship. Yes, our prison system is funded by our tax dollars. So it would be wrong for it to push religion on people. No warden-led prayers over the loudspeakers, for example. It would also be wrong for the prisons to provide worship services only for Christians, for example. Or for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but not Wiccans, Buddhists, and Satanists. No preferential treatment, in other words.
Yes, it's true that the non-believers aren't offered "services," but so what? So long as our prison system is government-run, it must provide for the inmates all the things they are entitled to. And while certain rights are lost when entering prison, the right to worship as one sees fit should not be one of them.
So I concur with the Supreme Court's decision. Inmates are entitled to have their religious services.
I do not, however, concur with the reasons all the justices voted on this. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, said that the First Amendment was not meant to erect a wall separating church and state. In this, he's dead wrong. He says, "[The federal government] need only refrain from making laws 'respecting an establishment of religion'; it must not interfere with a state establishment of religion."
This was true, for a time. Because for a time, none of the Constitution's amendments applied to the states. But all that changed when the 14th Amendment was passed. This amendment defines who qualifies as citizens of the United States, and mandates that all citizens are protected by all of the privileges and immunities of the United States, including the Constitution and its amendments. So a "state establishment of religion" is just as unconstitutional as a national one.
Mr. Thomas… I suggest you find another line of work.
