Slaughterhouses as Sites of Exception

Joanna Smith is PhD Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

Beginning inthe earliest weeks of the pandemic, America’s slaughterhouses have been a flash-point both for outbreaks of the coronavirus and for public anxiety. Industry leaders offered dire warnings of meat shortages as, predictably, COVID-19 clusters began to erupt at slaughterhouses around the country. The working conditions in meat plants were ripe for disease to spread rapidly: thousands of workers standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the disassembly line; crowded locker rooms, dining halls, and bathrooms; windowless buildings. Yet when the first slaughterhouse was shut down because of an outbreak – a Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota – cries for meat plants to stay open grew louder. Although there were slowdowns across the food system, with shortages of eggs, milk, produce, and canned goods, none seemed to evoke such an emotional response from the public as the threat of meat shortage.

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Conflicts between Religious Liberty and the New Public Health

Jeffrey B. Hammond is Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner Law
Michael J. DeBoer is Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner Law

 

In the United States, governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into focus conflicts between religious liberty and public health objectives and directives. State and local governments have utilized familiar and long-established public health measures to combat this pandemic, including orders mandating business closures, isolation, quarantine, testing, and contact tracing. These measures have had significant effects on religious believers and their places of worship. Apart from these public health orders’ disruption on routine worship assemblies, the orders have disrupted other important religious services, including baptisms, Eucharistic celebrations, weddings, funerals, last rites, and pastoral counseling.

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Hands-Off Religion in the Early Months of COVID-19

Samuel J. Levine is Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute at the Touro Law Center

For decades, scholars have documented the United States Supreme Court’s “hands-off approach” to questions of religious practice and belief, pursuant to which the Court has repeatedly declared that judges are precluded from making decisions that require evaluating and determining the substance of religious doctrine. At the same time, many scholars have criticized this approach, for a variety of reasons. The early months of the COVID-19 outbreak brought these issues to the forefront, both directly, in disputes over limitations on religious gatherings due to the virus, and indirectly, as the Supreme Court decided important cases turning on religious doctrine. Taken together, judicial rulings and rhetoric in these cases illustrate ways in which the hand-off approach remains, at once, both vibrant and vulnerable to critique.

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