Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah

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Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that an ordinance passed in Hialeah, Florida , forbidding the unnecessary killing of "an animal in a public or private ritual or ceremony not for the primary purpose of food consumption", was unconstitutional .

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 Supreme Court

  • 2.1 Opinion of the Court

  • 2.2 Scalia's concurrence in part

  • 2.3 Souter's concurrence in part

  • 2.4 Blackmun's concurrence in the judgment

• 3 Subsequent developments

• 4 See also

• 5 References

• 6 Further reading

• 7 External links

Background

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Santería is an Afro-Cuban religion developed as a syncretism of Roman Catholicism and Yoruba religion by Yoruba people brought as slaves from Yorubaland to Cuba by the Atlantic slave trade . Adherents can fulfill their destiny through the aid of beings known as orishas , who subsist off blood from animal sacrifice . Animals, usually chickens, killed during ritual slaughter are then cooked and eaten by the celebrants, except during death and healing rituals, where sick energy is believed to have passed into the sacrifice. Santeria has been subject to widespread persecution in Cuba, so it is traditionally practiced in secret, employing saint symbolism .

The Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye , Inc., is a Florida nonprofit organized in 1973 by Ernesto Pichardo, who was an Italero-level priest in the Santeria faith. The Lucumí language is used in the Santeria liturgy and Babalú-Ayé is the spirit of wrath and disease. In April 1987, the Church leased a property at 173 W. 5th Street, Hialeah, in Miami-Dade County, Florida and announced its intention to use the site to openly practice the faith.

The Hialeah City Council held an emergency public session on June 9, 1987. At the session, Councilman Silvio Cardoso stated that the religion is "in violation of everything this country stands for"; Councilman Andres Mejides observed that the Bible does not allow this particular type of animal sacrifice; and Councilman Julio Martinez noted (to audience applause) that in Cuba "people were put in jail for practicing this religion." Hialeah's police chaplain testified that the Church worshipped "demons" and the city attorney testified that "this community will not tolerate religious practices abhorrent to its citizens." Pichardo's brief testimony was met with taunts from the audience.

At the end of the session the city council passed a resolution announcing its commitment to prohibit "all religious groups which are inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety”. The city further passed a resolution incorporating Florida's animal cruelty statute into the city code and the city attorney obtained a Florida Attorney General 's Opinion from Bob Butterworth concluding that the state statute did not permit ritual animal sacrifice.

In September 1987, the city council unanimously passed three new ordinances that criminalized “sacrifices of animals for any type of ritual, regardless of whether or not the flesh or blood of the animal is to be consumed.” The city council exempted kosher slaughterhouses , regular slaughterhouses, hunting, fishing, pest extermination, euthanasia of stray animals, and feeding live rabbits to greyhounds .

The Church sued in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida . On June 10, 1988, U.S. District Judge Eugene P. Spellman granted absolute immunity to the individual city council members and the mayor in a summary judgment . On October 5, 1989, after a nine-day bench trial on the remaining claims, Judge Spellman ruled in favor of the city. In 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in an unsigned one-paragraph per curiam decision , where it noted that Judge Spellman "employed an arguably stricter standard" than that applied in _Employment Division v. Smith _ (1990), which had in the interim found Native Americans could be fired for their ritual use of peyote . In Smith, Justice Antonin Scalia had even cited Judge Spellman's opinion as authority, which the city highlighted in their appeals brief.

The Court in _Wisconsin v. Yoder _ (1972) had explicitly provided Amish parents a religious exemption from mandatory school attendance under the Free Exercise Clause. However, in the years since, free-exercise claimants had lost every case before the Court, with the exception of a line of employment decisions cases terminated by Smith. The Church's petition for certiorari from the Supreme Court of the United States was granted, with Douglas Laycock appearing for the Church during oral arguments on November 4, 1992.

Supreme Court

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Opinion of the Court

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