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Traditional Values Or New Tradition Of Prejudice? The Boy Scouts Of America Vs. The Unitarian Universalist Association Of Congregations, Eric Alan Isaacson
Traditional Values Or New Tradition Of Prejudice? The Boy Scouts Of America Vs. The Unitarian Universalist Association Of Congregations, Eric Alan Isaacson
Eric Alan Isaacson
President William Howard Taft, a Unitarian leader whose liberal faith had been viciously attacked by religious conservatives in the 1908 presidential campaign, used the White House as a platform in 1911 to launch a new nonsectarian organization for youth: The Boy Scouts of America (“BSA”). Lately, however, the BSA itself has come under the control of religious conservatives – who in 1992 banned Taft’s denomination from the BSA’s Religious Relationships Committee, and in 1998 threw Taft’s denomination out of its Religious Emblems Program. The denomination’s offense: A tradition of teaching its children that institutionalized discrimination is wrong. Unitarian Universalist religious …
God And Caesar In The Twenty-First Century: What Recent Cases Say About Church-State Relations In England And The United States , Judith Fischer, Chloe Wallace
God And Caesar In The Twenty-First Century: What Recent Cases Say About Church-State Relations In England And The United States , Judith Fischer, Chloe Wallace
Judith D. Fischer
This article analyzes current jurisprudence concerning the relationship of church and state in the U.S. and England, with special attention to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions in the Ten Commandments cases. The co-authors, law professors from the United States and the United Kingdom, present background about the history of religious establishment and church-state jurisprudence in the two countries. They then discuss the effects of each country’s recent cases on the subject. The authors conclude that the two countries are moving closer to each other on the continuum between establishment and disestablishment.
On Boy Scouts And Anti-Discrimination Law: The Associational Rights Of Quasi-Religious Organizations, Erez Reuveni
On Boy Scouts And Anti-Discrimination Law: The Associational Rights Of Quasi-Religious Organizations, Erez Reuveni
Erez Reuveni
This paper proposes a tripartite legal approach to analyzing the rights of private, expressive associations. Current law views private associations through a binary lens - either an organization is "religious," or it is "secular." But this dichotomy fails to account for organizations whose animating expressive purpose is both religious and secular. Using the Boy Scouts of America as a case study, this paper develops a third category of private associations, quasi-religious groups, and articulates why the category is necessary and how quasi-religious groups would fit within existing First Amendment jurisprudence. First, the article reviews numerous cases involving the Boy Scouts …