Dignity, Deference, and Discrimination: Religious Freedom in America’s Prisons

Elyse Slabaugh received a JD in 2024 from the J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University. This post is based on an article published in the BYU Law Review.

Incarceration by its nature denies a prisoner participation in the larger human community. To deny the opportunity to affirm membership in a spiritual community, however, may extinguish an inmate’s last source of hope for dignity and redemption.[1]

The difficulties of prison administration create the potential for prisons to succumb to neglect, racism, and religious intolerance and for prison officials to curtail inmates’ rights not only when necessary, but also when merely convenient.[2]

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Human Rights for Everyone, Everywhere: The Report of the Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexuality and Gender

Christine M. Venter is a teaching professor at Notre Dame Law School and affiliated faculty in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Among the fundamental core concepts underpinning human rights is the concept that they are indivisible and interdependent. This precept is sorely tested when proponents of religious liberty and LGBTQ+ rights respectively assert that their group’s rights trump the rights of other groups. At a conference last year in Rome, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asserted that “[r]eligious liberty is under attack in many places because it is dangerous to those who want to hold complete power.” Alito is not alone in his assessment; headlines abound about the threats to religious liberty,whether by the Chinese government in its persecution of Uyghurs, India’s attacks on Muslims, or acts of vandalism against Catholic Churches. The belief that religious liberty is under threat, coupled with incidents like the leak of the Dobbs decision, has created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. Alito went on to speculate that religiously motivated attacks “probably grow out of something dark and deep in the human DNA—the tendency to distrust and dislike people who are not like ourselves.”

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Obergefell v. Hodges: Five Years Later

Supreme Court of the United States ends marriage discrimination – Obergefell vs Hodges. Photo Creator: Ted Eytan

On June 26, 2015 the Supreme Court of the United States issued its momentous opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges.  Only a few SCOTUS decisions have provoked such strong debate over the majority’s arguments and its understanding of human dignity or the nature of judicial power.  In this blog conversation, American and European legal scholars and lawyers reflect on the postmodern understanding of marriage that inspired the decision and on the consequences of Obergefell for promotion of LGBTI-people’s rights, on religious exemptions, on democracy in the United States, on children’s rights, on the European Court of Human Right’s jurisprudence, and on the search for the compromise between religious freedom and anti-discrimination claims. This variety of reflections, both positive and critical, illustrates how the decision has become an important episode in American and global legal and human rights history. (more…)

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