Justices Affirm Religion’s Right to Sacrifice Animals

In a strong defense of religious freedom for even the most unpopular sects, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously Friday that a Florida city may not suppress an African religion by banning the ritual sacrifice of animals.

No religion or religious practice may be “singled out for discriminatory treatment,” the high court said, even if its activities are viewed as “abhorrent” by most.

The Constitution “commits government itself to religious tolerance,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said for the court. “Legislators may not devise mechanisms, overt or disguised, designed to persecute or oppress a religion or its practices.”

Friday’s ruling in this term’s most interesting religion case did not so much make new law as highlight an old principle.

The First Amendment guarantees to all Americans “the free exercise of religion,” but that clause is rarely invoked in legal cases, mostly because government bodies rarely seek to suppress a religion.

However, the case before the court (Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye vs. Hialeah, 91-948) proved to be the exception.

In 1987, residents of the Miami suburb reacted angrily when they learned that leaders of the Santeria faith planned to open a church there.

The religion originated with the Yoruba people of West Africa and came to this hemisphere with blacks who had been sold into slavery. During the 19th Century, it became enmeshed with elements of Catholicism.

In recent years, an estimated 50,000 Santerians have settled in South Florida, where they have been greeted with dismay and disdain. Their worship services regularly include the sacrifice of chickens, goats, ducks and other small animals.

Angry residents told the Hialeah City Council that animals were being kept in filthy, inhumane conditions and that they were being slaughtered cruelly by cutting their neck arteries. In response, the city enacted new laws making “public ritualistic animal sacrifices” a crime.

Church leaders filed a lawsuit charging that the new ordinances violated their religious rights, but both a federal judge and a U.S. appeals court in Atlanta rejected their claims.

In their appeal to the high court, church lawyers stressed that animals can be killed in South Florida for virtually any reason, except for religious purposes.

For example, residents of Hialeah can kill animals for sport through hunting and fishing. They can slaughter animals for food. They can kill rodents as pests. Stray dogs and cats can be put to death as well.

“The record in this case compels the conclusion that suppression of the central element of the Santeria worship was the object of the ordinances,” Kennedy wrote in a 26-page opinion.

While the city can enforce laws to ensure that the animals be properly cared for and their carcasses properly disposed of, it cannot “suppress Santeria religious worship” by outlawing ritual killings, he said.

It marked the second time this week that the court said the government cannot discriminate against religion. On Monday, it struck down on free speech grounds a New York law that permitted social and civil groups to use a high school auditorium, but not Christian groups whose speakers professed “traditional family values.”

Friday’s ruling, however, won only a lukewarm reaction from religious leaders.

The American Jewish Congress, for example, said that the decision contained “good news and bad news.” On the plus side, it made clear a city or state may not “target” a particular religion through its laws.

But the bad news, in their view, was that six of the nine justices said they continue to believe that the law need not give special exemptions to unpopular religious practices.

For example, in a 1990 decision in Oregon vs. Smith, the court upheld the firing of a Native American who admitted to using the illegal drug peyote during a religious ceremony. In that case, the court said the general law against drug use for everyone overrides the claim for a special religious exemption.

By contrast, the Florida case was not a general law, the court said, because animals could be killed for a variety of other reasons.

Religious-rights advocates have been urging Congress to overturn the 1990 peyote decision, and a bill to do just that, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, recently passed the House and is pending in the Senate.

Without such protection, religious interests lose out to state laws, University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock said. As examples, he cited incidents in which a Catholic hospital was required to teach its medical students in obstetrics how to perform abortions in compliance with state law, even though the hospital officials had a religious objection to abortion. Similarly, Jewish and Muslim prisoners have not been able to get meals that comply with their religious needs, he said.

Not surprisingly, animal-rights activists denounced the ruling.

The Humane Society of the United States condemned the court for sanctioning such cruelty to animals. “These sacrifices are much more violent than the court describes and thousands of animals are never eaten after these sacrifices,” said Marc Paulhus, a vice president of the society.

He described the animal sacrifices as an “ancient tribal” rite that could be abolished and substituted with “offerings of cigars, fruit, vegetables or money.”