The August issue of the Department of Justice’s Religious Freedom in Focus newsletter has the following update on two lawsuits making their way through the courts:
The Department of Justice filed two briefs this month defending the constitutionality of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (“RLUIPA”).
On August 15, the Department filed a brief in Holiness is the Way Ministries v. Coweta County, Georgia, a case involving a RLUIPA challenge by a Christian congregation that was denied a conditional use permit to build a church in the county. The county moved to dismiss the complaint on various grounds, including arguing that RLUIPA is unconstitutional. The United States’ intervened in the case to defend RLUIPA’s constitutionality.
In its brief, the United States argues that RLUIPA is a valid exercise of Congress’s explicit power to enact legislation to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. In addition to protecting against states’ denial of equal protection of the laws, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause incorporates First Amendment protections such as free exercise of religion. The United States’ brief recounts the history of RLUIPA, showing that Congress relied on what it termed “‘massive evidence’ of a pattern of religious discrimination in state and local land use decision,” and acted to enforce constitutional protections of religious freedom. The United States’ brief additionally argues that RLUIPA is valid under the Commerce Clause and the Spending Clause.
The United States’ brief also maintains that RLUIPA does not violate the Tenth Amendment by imposing a federal regulatory program on states, as the county argued. The brief notes, quoting a Court of Appeals decision, that “while RLUIPA may preempt laws that discriminate against or exclude religious institutions entirely, it leaves individual states free to eliminate the discrimination in any way they choose, so long as the discrimination is eliminated.”
Finally, the United States’ brief argues that RLUIPA does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. RLUIPA is a permissible accommodation of religion that simply “alleviate[s] significant government interference with the exercise of religion.”
On August 1, the United States filed a similar brief in Unitarian Universalist Church of Minnetonka v. City of Wayzata, a RLUIPA case challenging a city’s denial of rezoning to allow a congregation to build a new church. The brief, like the Coweta County brief, notes that Congress found a “consistent, widespread pattern of political and governmental resistance to a core feature of religious exercise: the ability to assemble for worship.” The brief concludes that RLUIPA is well within Congress’s enforcement power under the Fourteenth Amendment and that it respects the separation of powers.
As in the Coweta brief, the United States’ brief in Wayzata flatly rejects the argument that RLUIPA violates the Establishment Clause. Quoting the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobbie v. Unemployment Appeals Commission (1987), the brief notes that the “Supreme Court has ‘long recognized that the government may (and sometimes must) accommodate religious practices and that it may do so without violating the Establishment Clause.”
The newsletter can be accessed at: http://www.justice.gov/crt/spec_topics/religiousdiscrimination/newsletter/focus_48.html#3
