Yesterday, June 4, plaintiff Edith Rapp issued an amended complaint in her lawsuit against Jews for Jesus.
The amended complaint still constains a defamation count, this time asserting that while itwould not necessarily be defamatoryto depicta Christian asbelonging to a particular Christian
Would it be defamatory to assert, as many fundamentalist Christians do about others of different denominations, that a person who considers herself to be a Christian, is not one?
Would it be defamatory to assert, as some of my relatives do about me, that I am damned to hell because I don't
I continue to be somewhat skeptical of the defamation claim, for reasons I mentioned
before. But I don't think the examples below are quite analogous: Both of them
involve statements of opinion about (1) how to characterize a person's beliefs, and
(2) the spiritual consequences of those
I take the point, to a point. But to say someone is not a Christian is
not just a characterization of the beliefs of that person. It is a
status statement -- that so and so is not in fact what she claims to be
-- is not in fact a Christian.
On Saturday, June 5, 2004, at 11:19 AM, Volokh,
