U.S. Restores Special Protections for Religious Groups

President Clinton signed into law Friday a bill designed to restore strong legal protections for religious freedom when conflicts arise with cities, zoning boards, prisons and nursing homes.

“Religious liberty is a constitutional value of the highest order, and the framers of the Constitution included protection for the free exercise of religion in the very first amendment,” Clinton said in a statement after signing the bill. “This act recognizes the importance the free exercise of religion plays in our democratic society.”

The law, which requires local officials to give special treatment to churches, synagogues and religious assemblies or lose their federal funding, is aimed at protecting historic cathedrals and storefront churches. Often these congregations run into conflicts with neighborhoods and business districts over parking, traffic, zoning or new construction, particularly if the members bring with them a new religion or style of worship.

“No government shall impose a land-use regulation in a manner that imposes a substantial burden on the religious exercise of a person,” except where officials can show a “compelling” reason, the law says.

Supporters, including a broad spectrum of religious and civil liberties groups, hope that the president’s signature will end a 10-year struggle over the status of religious liberty in American law. But that seems unlikely.

Local officials have protested the special protections for religious groups, and church leaders said they expect it to be challenged in the courts.

During congressional debate, sponsors cited several disputes from the Los Angeles area to justify the law.

In Hancock Park, some Orthodox Jews had sought to use a private home as a synagogue, but a homeowners’ association objected and the city of Los Angeles refused to give them an exemption from the residential zoning ordinance. In Rolling Hills Estates, a small Christian church sued because it was barred from meeting in storefronts that were zoned for commercial activity.

In a Boston suburb, a Mormon church is set to open--without its steeple--as neighbors wage a legal fight to tear down the temple, which they say threatens the character of their community.

An unusually broad coalition--from the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council on the right to the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way on the left--came together to support the legislation.

“We agreed the government should not be in the business of regulating people’s exercise of their religion,” said Christopher T. Anders, ACLU legislative counsel.

The National Assn. of Counties contended that the legislation represents an “unwarranted and excessive intrusion” into local government’s land-use authority.

“I have a lot of concerns about the bill,” said Los Angeles Assistant City Atty. Anthony S. Alperin. “Rather than treating religious uses in a fair and equitable way with respect to similar uses, it treats them in a much different and more favorable way,” even though religious uses can have the same effects on the surrounding neighborhood.

“We should treat religious uses the same as other uses,” he added. “We should treat them from a zoning standpoint on the basis of what their impacts are on the surrounding communities.”

Jan LaRue, the Family Research Council’s senior director of legal studies, said: “This legislation doesn’t guarantee that a religious claimant will always win. It only guarantees that claimant a chance.”

The law is a scaled-down version of a religious liberty bill that ran into sudden opposition last year. Gay rights leaders and civil rights activists were concerned that the bill would have allowed landlords and employers to refuse to deal with gays and lesbians by citing religious objections.

Two months ago, House and Senate sponsors agreed to narrow the bill so that it would address only land-use disputes and religious conflicts involving people under the control of others, such as prisoners and nursing home patients.

Until 1990, the Supreme Court had said that the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of the “free exercise of religion” usually required the government to make exceptions for religious claimants. The Amish, for example, could not be compelled to send their children to high school, it said, and states could not deny unemployment benefits to Seventh-day Adventists who refused to work on Saturdays.

But in 1990, the high court reversed itself in a case involving two Native Americans who had been fired from state jobs after they ingested peyote, a hallucinogen that they said was central to their religious celebrations.

Speaking for a 5-4 majority in the case of Oregon vs. Smith, Justice Antonin Scalia said that religious claimants are not entitled to special exemptions from ordinary laws. The government can enforce laws against everyone equally, so long as a religious group is not singled out for discriminatory treatment.

Scalia’s opinion surprised mainstream church leaders because it left no room for the special status of religion. If it were read literally, for example, the Roman Catholic Church could have been sued for illegal sex discrimination because it refused to hire women as priests.

Not surprisingly, Congress took up the issue and, in 1993, passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The measure directly reversed the Supreme Court’s ruling and restored religion to a special place under the law.

However, the law’s constitutionality was in doubt. A test case emerged in the small town of Boerne, Texas, where the city’s historical zoning commission had refused to allow leaders of a Catholic parish to tear down and rebuild the facade of their mission-style church on the main street.

Under the 1993 law, city officials were obliged to defer to the wishes of church leaders. But when the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices sided with the city and struck down the law as unconstitutional. Only the high court can determine the meaning of the 1st Amendment, the justices declared.

Undaunted, Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.) drew up the measure signed into law Friday.