Sunday, July 13, 2014 2:46:29 AM
The Time A Corporation Cited Religious Freedom As A Way To Avoid Desegregation
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Monday, 6/30/2014 3:55 pm
UPDATE: Rachel Maddow discussed [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/01/rachel-maddow-christian-segregationists-would-be-confused-by-hobby-lobby-ruling/ ] the Piggie Park case on msnbc last night.
[the referenced Maddow segment embedded; fullpost of the segment second item below]
In her dissent in the Hobby Lobby case today, Justice Ginsburg mentioned [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/hobby-lobby-religious-rights-secular-profit-corporations-just-one-time ] a 1968 precedent in which the owner of a chain of barbecue restaurants in South Carolina “refused to serve black patrons based on his religious beliefs opposing racial integration.”
The Hobby Lobby majority emphasized that their ruling applied only to contraceptive coverage but would not undercut laws prohibiting racial discrimination. The conservative Justices said that the latter are “precisely tailored” to meet the government’s compelling interest in eradicating racial discrimination, while the Affordable Care Act provision falls in this case because it is not the least restrictive means to meet the government’s interest in providing women access to contraception.
At the time that that case, Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, was being decided, the majority of Americans had religious objections to interracial marriage [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/28417/most-americans-approve-interracial-marriages.aspx ] and many preachers made the religious case for segregation [ http://www.drslewis.org/camille/2013/03/15/is-segregation-scriptural-by-bob-jones-sr-1960/ ]. Efforts to defend the purported right of Christian schools to discriminate against African Americans [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.html (first item two posts back, at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103100000 and preceding and following)] greatly shaped the modern-day Religious Right.
In its 8-0 decision in Piggie Park, the Supreme Court upheld [ http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=390&invol=400 ] the Fourth Circuit Court’s ruling [ http://openjurist.org/377/f2d/433/newman-v-piggie-park-enterprises-inc-l ] against the restaurant chain and found that it was not exempt from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 simply because its owner had religious objections to the law.
The Supreme Court threw out Piggie Park’s “patently frivolous” claims when determining that Piggie Park must pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees:
Indeed, this is not even a borderline case, for the respondents interposed defenses so patently frivolous that a denial of counsel fees to the petitioners would be manifestly inequitable. Thus, for example, the "fact that the defendants had discriminated both at [the] drive-ins and at [the sandwich shop] was . . . denied . . . [although] the defendants could not and did not undertake at the trial to support their denials. Includable in the same category are defendants' contention, twice pleaded after the decision in Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U. S. 294, . . . that the Act was unconstitutional on the very grounds foreclosed by McClung, and defendants' contention that the Act was invalid because it 'contravenes the will of God' and constitutes an interference with the 'free exercise of the Defendant's religion.'" (emphasis added)
The attorney representing the petitioners suing Piggie Park also addressed [ http://www.oyez.org/cases/1960-1969/1967/1967_339#argument ] in court the “First Amendment religious privilege claim that petitioner asserted that his religion required him” to deny service to black customers.
“I’m just a fair man. I want to be known as a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world as I have been doing throughout the last 25 years,” the late Piggie Park owner, Maurice Bessinger, told South Carolina’s The State newspaper [ http://www.thestate.com/2014/02/24/3288326/barbecue-eatery-owner-segregationist.html ] about the court case.
According to the paper, Bessinger continued to distribute “pro-slavery tracts at his Maurice’s Gourmet Barbecue headquarters in West Columbia – under the shadow of the enormous Confederate flag he flew outside.”
At the time, Bessinger was distributing pro-slavery audiotapes and gave customers a discount if they bought his literature. South Carolina had “biblical slavery,” Bessinger claimed, which was kinder and different than other forms of slavery. Bessinger established his Piggie Park Enterprises in Cayce in 1953. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bessinger put signs in his stores saying blacks weren’t welcome.
…
Also in 1964, Bessinger — who at that time owned four Piggie Park restaurants — stood in the door of one of his stores to prevent a black minister from entering. Bessinger would allow blacks to buy food to take out, but not to eat in his restaurant. African-Americans, represented by then-civil rights lawyer Matthew Perry, took him to court.
In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Bessinger 8-0.
Ironically, that Supreme Court opinion — Newman vs. Piggie Park Enterprises — enshrined in law the concept that lawyers who win civil rights cases are entitled to have their attorneys’ fees paid by the loser. “If successful plaintiffs were routinely forced to bear their own attorney’s fees, few aggrieved parties would be in a position to advance the public interest by” going to court, the Supreme Court said, according to the book “Matthew J. Perry” by Lewis Burke and Belinda Gergel.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/time-corporation-cited-religious-freedom-way-avoid-desegregation
--
SCOTUS claim of 'narrow' ruling defies reason
Rachel Maddow
June 30, 2014
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor for Slate magazine, talks with Rachel Maddow about the contradictions and impracticalities built into the Supreme Court's Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling and outlined in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent.
©2014 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/55549457#55549457 [with transcript], http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/scotus-claim-of-narrow-ruling-defies-reason-293677123872 [with comments] [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-june-30-2014-trms (with comments)] [the above YouTube of the segment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Gc4PDZNe8 (with comments)]
--
Alarmed churches fear 'Hobby Lobby' fallout
Rachel Maddow
June 30, 2014
Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, talks with Rachel Maddow about previous religious liberty rulings by the Supreme Court that contradict today's Hobby Lobby ruling and why the Court shouldn't be making religious judgments.
©2014 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/55549471#55549471 [with transcript], http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/why-hobby-lobby-ruling-alarms-some-churches-293680195539 [with comments] [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-june-30-2014-trms (with comments)] [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqyORCHd9qM (with comments)]
--
The Trap in the Supreme Court’s “Narrow” Decisions
Illustration by the Heads of State.
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
June 30, 2014
The Supreme Court concluded its term today with a pair of decisions widely described as “narrow”—that is, of limited application except to the parties in the lawsuits. Don’t believe it.
In fact, the Court’s decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Harris v. Quinn conform to an established pattern for the Roberts Court. It’s generally a two-step process: in confronting a politically charged issue, the court first decides a case in a “narrow” way, but then uses that decision as a precedent to move in a more dramatic, conservative direction in a subsequent case.
Harris, about the rights of workers and their unions, provides a classic example of the process in action. The larger issue here concerns government workers who are covered by a union contract but don’t want to pay dues. Excusing these employees from contributing to union coffers would cripple the political and economic power of unions. This particular case concerned home-health-care workers in Illinois. By a vote of five-to-four, the five Republican appointees to the court allowed these workers—and only these workers—to avoid contributing to the union. But in his opinion Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, clearly indicates that the majority would have been willing extend its judgment to all government workers—and wound unions even more deeply.
The Hobby Lobby decision follows the same pattern. Again, Justice Alito’s opinion (for the same five-to-four majority) expressed its ruling in narrow terms. Alito asserted that the case concerned only a single “closely held” private company whose owners had religious objections to providing certain forms of birth control. According to the court, federal law required that those wishes be honored.
But, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, there is almost no limitation on the logic of the majority’s view. Almost any closely held companies—which make up a substantial chunk of the American economy—can now claim a religious orientation, and they can now seek to excuse themselves from all sorts of obligations, including honoring certain anti-discrimination laws. And after today’s “narrow” rulings, those cases will come.
The template here is the court’s voting-rights jurisprudence. In the 2009 case of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, the court upheld [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-322.ZS.html ] a challenge to an application of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts’s decision was “narrow,” and it even drew the votes of the court’s more liberal members. Four years later, though, Roberts used the Northwest Austin precedent as a wedge to destroy both Section 4 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, as well as much of its effectiveness, in the case of Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/12-96 ]. The liberals who signed on to the Northwest Austin decision howled that they’d been betrayed. But it was too late.
The liberals have seemingly learned their lesson. None signed on to today’s “narrow” majority opinions. They will not be surprised when the conservative quintet uses these decisions to rewrite the laws in profound ways. We shouldn’t be surprised, either.
© 2014 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/hobby-lobby-the-supreme-courts-narrow-decisions.html [with comments]
--
‘Hobby Lobby’ case already opening floodgates to discrimination
Rachel Maddow
July 02, 2014
Rachel Maddow reports on how the so-called “narrow” Hobby Lobby ruling by the Supreme Court is already broadening to include all types of contraception and is being used to argue that anti-gay discrimination is justified by “religious freedom.”
©2014 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/55566322#55566322 [with transcript], http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/hobby-lobby-seen-as-means-of-discrimination-295404611510 [with comments] [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-july-2-2014-trms (with comment)] [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9feIXNUk2w (with comments)]
--
in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding (and any future other following), see also (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=34165177 and preceding and following
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Monday, 6/30/2014 3:55 pm
UPDATE: Rachel Maddow discussed [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/01/rachel-maddow-christian-segregationists-would-be-confused-by-hobby-lobby-ruling/ ] the Piggie Park case on msnbc last night.
[the referenced Maddow segment embedded; fullpost of the segment second item below]
In her dissent in the Hobby Lobby case today, Justice Ginsburg mentioned [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/hobby-lobby-religious-rights-secular-profit-corporations-just-one-time ] a 1968 precedent in which the owner of a chain of barbecue restaurants in South Carolina “refused to serve black patrons based on his religious beliefs opposing racial integration.”
The Hobby Lobby majority emphasized that their ruling applied only to contraceptive coverage but would not undercut laws prohibiting racial discrimination. The conservative Justices said that the latter are “precisely tailored” to meet the government’s compelling interest in eradicating racial discrimination, while the Affordable Care Act provision falls in this case because it is not the least restrictive means to meet the government’s interest in providing women access to contraception.
At the time that that case, Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, was being decided, the majority of Americans had religious objections to interracial marriage [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/28417/most-americans-approve-interracial-marriages.aspx ] and many preachers made the religious case for segregation [ http://www.drslewis.org/camille/2013/03/15/is-segregation-scriptural-by-bob-jones-sr-1960/ ]. Efforts to defend the purported right of Christian schools to discriminate against African Americans [ http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.html (first item two posts back, at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103100000 and preceding and following)] greatly shaped the modern-day Religious Right.
In its 8-0 decision in Piggie Park, the Supreme Court upheld [ http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=390&invol=400 ] the Fourth Circuit Court’s ruling [ http://openjurist.org/377/f2d/433/newman-v-piggie-park-enterprises-inc-l ] against the restaurant chain and found that it was not exempt from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 simply because its owner had religious objections to the law.
The Supreme Court threw out Piggie Park’s “patently frivolous” claims when determining that Piggie Park must pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees:
Indeed, this is not even a borderline case, for the respondents interposed defenses so patently frivolous that a denial of counsel fees to the petitioners would be manifestly inequitable. Thus, for example, the "fact that the defendants had discriminated both at [the] drive-ins and at [the sandwich shop] was . . . denied . . . [although] the defendants could not and did not undertake at the trial to support their denials. Includable in the same category are defendants' contention, twice pleaded after the decision in Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U. S. 294, . . . that the Act was unconstitutional on the very grounds foreclosed by McClung, and defendants' contention that the Act was invalid because it 'contravenes the will of God' and constitutes an interference with the 'free exercise of the Defendant's religion.'" (emphasis added)
The attorney representing the petitioners suing Piggie Park also addressed [ http://www.oyez.org/cases/1960-1969/1967/1967_339#argument ] in court the “First Amendment religious privilege claim that petitioner asserted that his religion required him” to deny service to black customers.
“I’m just a fair man. I want to be known as a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world as I have been doing throughout the last 25 years,” the late Piggie Park owner, Maurice Bessinger, told South Carolina’s The State newspaper [ http://www.thestate.com/2014/02/24/3288326/barbecue-eatery-owner-segregationist.html ] about the court case.
According to the paper, Bessinger continued to distribute “pro-slavery tracts at his Maurice’s Gourmet Barbecue headquarters in West Columbia – under the shadow of the enormous Confederate flag he flew outside.”
At the time, Bessinger was distributing pro-slavery audiotapes and gave customers a discount if they bought his literature. South Carolina had “biblical slavery,” Bessinger claimed, which was kinder and different than other forms of slavery. Bessinger established his Piggie Park Enterprises in Cayce in 1953. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bessinger put signs in his stores saying blacks weren’t welcome.
…
Also in 1964, Bessinger — who at that time owned four Piggie Park restaurants — stood in the door of one of his stores to prevent a black minister from entering. Bessinger would allow blacks to buy food to take out, but not to eat in his restaurant. African-Americans, represented by then-civil rights lawyer Matthew Perry, took him to court.
In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Bessinger 8-0.
Ironically, that Supreme Court opinion — Newman vs. Piggie Park Enterprises — enshrined in law the concept that lawyers who win civil rights cases are entitled to have their attorneys’ fees paid by the loser. “If successful plaintiffs were routinely forced to bear their own attorney’s fees, few aggrieved parties would be in a position to advance the public interest by” going to court, the Supreme Court said, according to the book “Matthew J. Perry” by Lewis Burke and Belinda Gergel.
© 2014 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/time-corporation-cited-religious-freedom-way-avoid-desegregation
--
SCOTUS claim of 'narrow' ruling defies reason
Rachel Maddow
June 30, 2014
Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor for Slate magazine, talks with Rachel Maddow about the contradictions and impracticalities built into the Supreme Court's Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling and outlined in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent.
©2014 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/55549457#55549457 [with transcript], http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/scotus-claim-of-narrow-ruling-defies-reason-293677123872 [with comments] [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-june-30-2014-trms (with comments)] [the above YouTube of the segment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Gc4PDZNe8 (with comments)]
--
Alarmed churches fear 'Hobby Lobby' fallout
Rachel Maddow
June 30, 2014
Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, talks with Rachel Maddow about previous religious liberty rulings by the Supreme Court that contradict today's Hobby Lobby ruling and why the Court shouldn't be making religious judgments.
©2014 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/55549471#55549471 [with transcript], http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/why-hobby-lobby-ruling-alarms-some-churches-293680195539 [with comments] [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-june-30-2014-trms (with comments)] [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqyORCHd9qM (with comments)]
--
The Trap in the Supreme Court’s “Narrow” Decisions
Illustration by the Heads of State.
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
June 30, 2014
The Supreme Court concluded its term today with a pair of decisions widely described as “narrow”—that is, of limited application except to the parties in the lawsuits. Don’t believe it.
In fact, the Court’s decisions in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Harris v. Quinn conform to an established pattern for the Roberts Court. It’s generally a two-step process: in confronting a politically charged issue, the court first decides a case in a “narrow” way, but then uses that decision as a precedent to move in a more dramatic, conservative direction in a subsequent case.
Harris, about the rights of workers and their unions, provides a classic example of the process in action. The larger issue here concerns government workers who are covered by a union contract but don’t want to pay dues. Excusing these employees from contributing to union coffers would cripple the political and economic power of unions. This particular case concerned home-health-care workers in Illinois. By a vote of five-to-four, the five Republican appointees to the court allowed these workers—and only these workers—to avoid contributing to the union. But in his opinion Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, clearly indicates that the majority would have been willing extend its judgment to all government workers—and wound unions even more deeply.
The Hobby Lobby decision follows the same pattern. Again, Justice Alito’s opinion (for the same five-to-four majority) expressed its ruling in narrow terms. Alito asserted that the case concerned only a single “closely held” private company whose owners had religious objections to providing certain forms of birth control. According to the court, federal law required that those wishes be honored.
But, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, there is almost no limitation on the logic of the majority’s view. Almost any closely held companies—which make up a substantial chunk of the American economy—can now claim a religious orientation, and they can now seek to excuse themselves from all sorts of obligations, including honoring certain anti-discrimination laws. And after today’s “narrow” rulings, those cases will come.
The template here is the court’s voting-rights jurisprudence. In the 2009 case of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, the court upheld [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-322.ZS.html ] a challenge to an application of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts’s decision was “narrow,” and it even drew the votes of the court’s more liberal members. Four years later, though, Roberts used the Northwest Austin precedent as a wedge to destroy both Section 4 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, as well as much of its effectiveness, in the case of Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/12-96 ]. The liberals who signed on to the Northwest Austin decision howled that they’d been betrayed. But it was too late.
The liberals have seemingly learned their lesson. None signed on to today’s “narrow” majority opinions. They will not be surprised when the conservative quintet uses these decisions to rewrite the laws in profound ways. We shouldn’t be surprised, either.
© 2014 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/06/hobby-lobby-the-supreme-courts-narrow-decisions.html [with comments]
--
‘Hobby Lobby’ case already opening floodgates to discrimination
Rachel Maddow
July 02, 2014
Rachel Maddow reports on how the so-called “narrow” Hobby Lobby ruling by the Supreme Court is already broadening to include all types of contraception and is being used to argue that anti-gay discrimination is justified by “religious freedom.”
©2014 NBCNews.com
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/55566322#55566322 [with transcript], http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/hobby-lobby-seen-as-means-of-discrimination-295404611510 [with comments] [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-july-2-2014-trms (with comment)] [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9feIXNUk2w (with comments)]
--
in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding (and any future other following), see also (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=34165177 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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