I'm curious about something in your letter. Toward the end, you say, "Article 3, section 18 of the Constitution of Mississippi already protects as sacred 'the free enjoyment of all religious sentiments and the different modes of worship.' Senate Bill 2681 is unnecessary to protect freedom of belief and worship in Mississippi, and potentially quite harmful."
It appears that you are suggesting that religiious liberty simply requires that a person be allowed to believe what they do and to worship however they do. That seems like a very very narrow characterization of religious liberty. The 1st Amendment specifically talks about free exercise, not merely freedom of belief and worship. What would you say that free exercise refers to when it says it is to be protected? Brad Pardee From: religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu [mailto:religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Ira Lupu Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:21 AM To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics Subject: letter opposing Mississippi RFRA A group of ten legal academics, including myself and a number of others who post on this list, have prepared a letter urging the legislative defeat of a proposed Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Mississippi. The letter has recently been delivered and made publicly available. It can be found here: http://www.thirdway.org/publications/795 -- Ira C. Lupu F. Elwood & Eleanor Davis Professor of Law, Emeritus George Washington University Law School 2000 H St., NW Washington, DC 20052 (202)994-7053 Co-author (with Professor Robert Tuttle) of "Secular Government, Religious People" (forthcoming, summer 2014, Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.) My SSRN papers are here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=181272#reg
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
