At times, religious-liberty questions that come before courts involve claims of discrimination, but other cases involve believers’ desire for exemptions from generally applicable laws. Perry Dane explores the philosophic underpinnings behind such exemptions:

Historically . . . exemption claims have been controversial across the ideological spectrum. The fact is that such claims, in their paradigmatic form, are, as Justice Antonin Scalia argued in 1990, constitutionally anomalous. They simply do not have the look and feel of other constitutional or even other legal rights. . . . [I]t is easy to see why the Supreme Court in 1879 would have declared that religion-based exemptions threaten “in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.” That objection is still the most powerful argument against the very idea of exemptions.

This radical . . . objection requires a radical solution. To begin with, we need to understand religion as a sovereign realm distinct from the state, its government, and its claims. In James Madison’s words, “Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.” When a religious person claims an exemption from the law of the state, he is not arguing that he is a law unto himself, but rather that he is subject to another sovereign. This idea is consistent with a larger commitment to legal pluralism, a jurisprudential position that denies that law is a phenomenon limited to the state.

The U.S., Dane notes, currently is witnessing a number of struggles over freedom of religion, exacerbated by their entanglement with the culture wars. He believes the result to be a “crisis” that can be solved as much by better understanding as by good jurisprudence:

The current crisis has seen way too little understanding and empathy in some of the pushback to recent religious-liberty claims. For example, some reactions to claims seeking exemption from contraceptive coverage mandates have been stubbornly oblivious to basic religious complexities: the religious life is not limited to what goes on in churches or even in religious institutions. It can also be manifest in commerce and mundane employer-employee relations. Religion can, and in some traditions must, involve itself in every department of life. To demand the privatization of religion, as some have for centuries, should be a non-starter.

Yet the failure of genuine encounter has come from the religious side of the encounter too. In the current political atmosphere, religious convictions have too often become subsumed into tribal allegiances and political identities.

Established in 2012 and maintaining branches in Europe, North America, and Iran, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network claims its goal is merely to show “solidarity” for imprisoned Palestinians. The organization’s leader, however, has admitted to being a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a notorious terrorist group whose most recent accomplishments include murdering a seventeen-year-old girl. As Arsen Ostrovsky and Patricia Teitelbaum point out, Samidoun is just one example of how the European Union allows Iran-backed terrorists to operate in its midst:

The PFLP is a proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides the terror group with money, training, and weapons. Samidoun . . . has a branch in Tehran. It has even held events there, under the pretext of “cultural activity,” to elicit support for operations in Europe. Its leader, Khaled Barakat, is a regular on Iran’s state [channel] PressTV, calling for violence and lauding Iran’s involvement in the region. It is utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the EU has not yet designated Samidoun a terror group.

According to the Council of the European Union, groups and/or individuals can be added to the EU terror list on the basis of “proposals submitted by member states based on a decision by a competent authority of a member state or a third country.” In this regard, there is already a standing designation by Israel of Samidoun as a terror group and a decision of a German court finding Barakat to be a senior PFLP operative.

Given the irrefutable axis-of-terror between Samidoun, PFLP, and the Iranian regime, the EU has a duty to put Samidoun and senior Samidoun leaders on the EU terror list. It should do this not as some favor to Israel, but because otherwise it continues to turn a blind eye to a group that presents a clear and present security threat to the European Union and EU citizens.