(Best of the tube tonight: Catch us on Fox News Channel discussing the State of the Union at 8:30 p.m.ET and then again after the speech.) Judging by the howls from the left, you’d have thought the world was coming to an end last summer when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. More than six months later, the world is still here, and the high court has just handed down another ruling that affirms a religious-liberty claim. This time the ruling, styled Holt v. Hobbs, was unanimous and is likely to produce few howls—although there was a telling whimper in a concurrence from two liberal justices. Gregory Holt is an Arkansas prison inmate and self-described devout Muslim—he also goes by Abdul Maalik Muhammad—who objected to the prison’s grooming policy, which prohibits beards on the grounds that they could be used to conceal contraband and make inmates harder to identify. Holt’s religious beliefs forbid shaving. He offered to wear a beard trimmed to half an inch, but the warden said no dice. So he sued. In a decision written (like Hobby Lobby) by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held that Holt is free to maintain his half-inch beard. Hobby Lobby and Holt were decided under different laws—respectively, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, unwieldily known as RFRA and Rilupa for short. Each statute was enacted in response to a high court ruling interpreting religious freedom narrowly: Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which held that the First Amendment does not entitle believers to exemptions from generally applicable laws, and City of Bourne v. Flores (1997), which held RFRA unconstitutional as applied to the states. Both RFRA and Rilupa mandate that courts apply the legal standard known as “strict scrutiny” to a plaintiff’s claim that a generally applicable law or policy violates his religious liberty. The justices held that while the Correction Department’s objectives do constitute a “compelling interest”—one necessary condition of strict scrutiny—its policy as applied to Holt was not the “least restrictive means” of achieving this interest, and thus failed the test. This was not a hard case. Neither, for that matter, was Hobby Lobby, in which it was, if anything, even clearer that the government’s asserted compelling interest—making a range of contraceptive treatments and devices available to persons with employer-provided medical insurance—could have been accomplished via less-restrictive means.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 01:27:35 +0000
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