A Blow against Religious Freedom in Mississippi

A federal judge in Mississippi issued a preliminary injunction last month preventing a religious-liberty law, just passed by the state legislature, from going into effect. The law, known as HB 1523, preserves the right of those with “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction” about homosexual marriage to refrain from participating in or validating such marriages, provided their actions do not impede the ability of same-sex couples to marry. Calling the judge’s decision “extraordinarily misguided,” Richard A. Epstein explains his objections:

HB 1523 represents the kind of sensible accommodation that has long been the hallmark of religious liberty. . . . Judge Carlton W. Reeves struck down the Mississippi statute because he did not grasp the fundamental distinction between forcing others to yield to your beliefs and just asking to be left alone.

The new bill is intended to augment the state’s earlier Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allowed restrictions on religious liberties when they compete with “a government interest of the highest magnitude.” Traditionally, Epstein points out,

this language meant that the state could curb religious freedom in order to prevent riots in public places. . . . Not anymore. . . . [T]he argument has [now] commonly been made that the elimination of discrimination in all areas of American life counts as a compelling state interest, of course of the highest magnitude. . . .

Judge Reeves’s decision goes even farther, identifying the mere refusal of, say, a caterer to provide food for a gay wedding as doing “harm” to the couple—even if there are multiple other local caterers the couple could choose from. Such an “overbroad” definition of harm, according to Epstein, sets a precedent where any slight, real or perceived, against one individual could be cause to limit the rights of another.

Read more at Defining Ideas

More about: American law, Freedom of Religion, Gay marriage, Politics & Current Affairs, RFRA

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society