Is it a violation of religious freedom to ban beards for prison inmates?

The Supreme Court just granted cert in Holt v. Hobbs...

... is a case filed directly by an inmate, in a hand-written petition.

The claim of entitlement to wear a beard for religious reasons, in spite of the general rule against beards in prison, is premised not on the constitutional right to free exercise (which authorizes government to impose neutral, generally applicable rules even though they burden religion), but on a statutory right to hold government to a strict scrutiny standard when it puts a substantial burden on religion. The statute in question is not the work of some backward state — as a layperson familiar with the recent to-do in Arizona might imagine — but the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, adopted by unanimous consent in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives and signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000.

ADDED: 2 weeks ago, we were talking about another case involving prison, hair, and RLUIPA, in which Supreme Court review is being sought. That case, from the 11th Circuit, is called Knight v. Thompson. We also talked about it last summer, and I showed you an old exam from my Religion and the Constitution class that depicted 5 different prisoners with different reasons — some religious — objecting to a rule requiring short hair.

It was very interesting to me to see how students would respond to the 5 different needs for long hair. If I remember correctly, most students found the Sikh's interest so strong that they began there. But then what happens? Do you include all? Just the Rastafarian-inspired man?  None of the others? And does thinking about that make you want to exclude the Sikh too? If your answer is yes, then you may be an 11th Circuit judge.

"Now that leading mayoral candidates Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota have both vowed to add two Muslim holidays to the public school calendar..."

"... advocates for other religious and ethnic groups are clamoring for their days to be recognized too."

“I think the city has to recognize (Chinese New Year),” said [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver, a Democrat whose district includes Chinatown in lower Manhattan. “We don’t want to take away from the learning days, but we have to adjust the calendar appropriately to include all of the major populations that we have.”

All the major populations... what about the minor populations?

[City Councilman Daniel Dromm] introduced a resolution in July to close school on the holy day of Diwali, a festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains.

A spokesman for Lhota said he’d consider adding other holidays. De Blasio has said he supports adding the Chinese New Year, but his campaign wouldn’t comment on Diwali.

Where will it all end?

Imagine putting education first.

What if a black widow spider were to nest in a prisoner's dreadlocks?

That happened once. There might also be a fungus hidden in the hair-covered scalp. Weapons might be stowed in the hair, and guards searching for them by hand are afraid of getting cut by razor blades. Moreover, if a long-haired prisoner were to escape, he'd have a ready means of disguise: cut off that hair. These and other reasons were the "compelling interests" that worked for the government in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected a claim for a religious exemption to the no-long-hair policy in prison.

"The Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, where a gunman killed six people and injured four others..."

"... before killing himself Aug. 5, will hold a candlelight vigil at 8 p.m. Sunday in memory and support of the victims of today's Brookfield spa shooting."

"Yes, I’m a baptized Sikh woman with facial hair."

"Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body — it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being (which is genderless, actually) and, must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will."

"People before would stare at them because they’re different."

"I hope now, they’ll look at them with eyes of compassion because their hearts are broken."

A mass killing directed toward a particular religious group has the power to change how the [attacked] congregation views the outside world, says David Weaver-Zercher, a professor of American Religious History at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., and author of “Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy,” a study of the 2006 attacks against an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pa.

"He called non-whites 'dirt people,' and sent roses to his grandmother."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a new and substantial article on the Sikh temple murderer, Wade M. Page:

Fred Allen Lucas, a Bloomington, Ind., man who served with Page at Fort Bragg, N.C., in a psychological operations battalion, recalled that he spoke of the need for securing a homeland for white people and referred to all non-whites as "dirt people."

"It didn't matter if they were black, Indian, Native American, Latin - he hated them all," Lucas said.

The Sikh temple shooter was a 40-year-old former soldier named Wade Michael Page.

It's still not clear why the FBI is treating the murders as domestic terrorism. Perhaps the targeting of Sikhs by a non-Sikh is reason enough to investigate it as terrorism.

The neighbor says, as she understood it, the suspect had lived in the apartment with his girlfriend until their recent break-up. The suspect had then moved into another apartment nearby two weeks ago. She says he had returned to the old apartment and was banging on the door of his old apartment, demanding to be let in. The neighbor also said she believed the suspect had a 9-11 tattoo.

Of course, Sikhs had nothing to do with 9/11, though people sometimes mistake Sikhs for Muslims (and mistake Muslims generally for the subgroup of Muslims behind 9/11), but in a planned killing where someone goes to the place of worship, it would be harder to make the mistake.

ADDED: The FBI special agent in charge of the investigation said: "We are looking at ties to white supremacist groups."

Reporter challenges State Department official to explain how the U.S. Constitution gives Jay Leno the right to make fun of religion.

State Dept. spokesperson Victoria Nuland is grilled about a Jay Leno joke that has offended Sikhs. Here's the joke, which targets Mitt Romney:



The joke-writers probably did a Google image search for something like "fancy palace" without realizing that the glorious image they retrieved depicted a site revered to the exclusion humor.

I love the way Nuland keeps a fully dignified straight face as she encounters the challenge from the Indian reporter:

VIDEO.

As I conlawprof, I find this line the most amusing:

"As India celebrates tomorrow the Constitution Day of India, I have the copy of the U.S. Constitution, and it doesn't say anywhere anything that anybody can say anything or abuse or accuse anybody's religion."

Much funnier than a Jay Leno joke.

I also think it's interesting that CNSNews — which conceives of itself as an antidote to liberal news bias — seems to fault Nuland for citing, in her response to the reporter's question about the U.S. Constitution, the "freedom of religion and tolerance for all religions" but not the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. Obviously, Jay Leno has a free-speech right to mock religion and to label the Golden Temple Mitt Romney's summer home. (Maybe Nuland fretted about whether Leno had violated the photographer's copyright.)

Should Nuland have boldly celebrated the American free-speech tradition or was it appropriately diplomatic to murmur assurances about respect for religion?