ACSBlog

*This piece originally appeared on Take Care.

by Douglas NeJaime, ACS Board of Academic Advisors, Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law and Reva Siegel, ACS Board Member and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School.

Religious exemptions from laws that require doctors to care for patients, employers to pay employees, or store owners to deal with customers in a respectful and nondiscriminatory way can hurt and demean citizens who do not share the claimant’s religious beliefs. Exemption claims of this kind are now spreading under the banner of religious liberty in the culture wars.

Today, some conservatives are advancing expansive religious exemption claims to stigmatize contraception and restrict women’s access to it. Contraception is “the new abortion.” There are religious conservatives who call certain contraceptive methods “abortifacients,” even in cases where evidence shows that the methods do not operate in ways that satisfy their religious definition of abortifacients. Others oppose all methods of contraception as encouraging “a contraceptive mentality” that separates sex and reproduction.

These claims about contraception are connected not only to abortion but also to same-sex marriage. As we documented in our 2015 Yale Law Journal article, “Conscience Wars,” many religious conservatives object to contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage in part because they divert sex and marriage from procreative ends.

by LaJuana Davis, Professor of Law, Samford University Cumberland School of Law

Four mothers of Mississippi schoolchildren filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last week charging the state has failed to provide for public education under the requirements of an 1870 law that set conditions of the state’s readmission to the Union following the Civil War. The suit’s plaintiffs, represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have asked the court to void amendments to the state’s education article enacted after Reconstruction and restore education rights guaranteed under the 1868 constitution. Specifically, the suit claims that the state violated the Congressional Act of 1870 that conditioned Mississippi’s readmission to the Union on the state agreeing to never deprive its citizens of “school rights and privileges” secured by the 1868 state constitution. However, the complaint alleges, subsequent amendments to those school guarantees have resulted in a minimalist education clause that simply allows the legislature discretion to provide for whatever public school education that the legislature sees fit.

The suit’s lead defendant, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, responded in a statement that the suit was simply a fundraising attempt by SPLC “on the backs of Mississippi taxpayers.” While Gov. Bryant may be irritated by the second challenge to Mississippi’s education scheme brought by SPLC in a year, Mississippi has had far fewer education adequacy lawsuits than most states, largely due to the minimal standard of education that its state constitution requires.

Because Mississippi’s education clause requires no particular standard of education to be provided, the plaintiffs claim that some schoolchildren are learning in overcrowded classes   taught by inexperienced teachers and that those children have access to fewer educational resources and opportunities than students in other school districts. Most of the inequalities are being shouldered by majority-Black school districts, which may be affecting their students’ academic achievement.