Law Commons^™

Same-Sex Union Announcements: Precis On A Not So Picayune Matter, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Although some newspapers have voluntarily begun to publish same-sex union announcements, others will continue in their traditional exclusionary practices. Some of those papers can anticipate being accused in court of unlawful discrimination where the law allows that cause of action. Reflexively, those newspapers will in turn erect a defensive shield from such charges by appealing, at least in part, to the First Amendment.

This comment examines the viability of that defense. The set-piece for the discussion are the details of a complaint, described in Part I, lodged against the Times-Picayune by a lesbian couple that was denied access to its …

Same-Sex Union Announcements: Whether Newspapers Must Publish Them, And Why We Should Care, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

The recent decision by the New York Times to publish same-sex union announcements brought to national attention the struggle of gay men and lesbians to gain access to this contested space. To date only about ten percent of newspapers allow same-sex couples to publish announcements on terms equal to heterosexual couples. Although some couples have sued to have their announcements published, these claims have been rejected as interfering with the newspaper's First Amendment protections. This article considers whether the First Amendment's Free Press and Free Speech clauses in fact allow newspapers to discriminate in this way.

The article begins with …

Doma: An Unconstitutional Establishment Of Fundamentalist Christianity, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

This Article scrutinizes the constitutionality of the intent of the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA]. According to the text of the Act, DOMA's purposes are "to define and protect the institution of marriage," where marriage is defined to exclude same-sex partners. To be constitutionally valid under the Establishment Clause, this notion that heterosexual marriage requires "protection" from gay and lesbian persons must spring from a secular and not religious source. This Article posits that DOMA has crossed this forbidden line between the secular and the religious. DOMA, motivated and supported by fundamentalist Christian ideology, and lacking any genuine secular goals …

Restoring Free Exercise Protections By Limiting Them: Preventing A Repeat Of Smith, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith effectively removed all protections traditionally accorded the free exercise of religion. RFRA was designed to undo the effects of this decision by presumably setting back the clock of jurisprudence to the day before Smith. Even if RFRA is found to be constitutional, it will still, of itself, be ultimately ineffective since it undoes the effects of Smith without addressing the confluence of issues which made a decision like Smith likely. The clock may be set back, but without significant changes it can be expected to run forward again in much …

God Is As God Does: Law, Anthropology, And The Definition Of "Religion", James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

This Article first discusses the judicial deliberations upon the definition of religion. That discussion adopts a chronological sequence because, in legal matters, that is the one that counts.

It can be a tedious, but not particularly difficult task to summarize the legal struggle to define religion. The strategy applied to evaluate the product of that struggle is intellectual triangulation, whereby bearings from two fixed positions are used to specify that of that third. By analogy, the correct definition of "religion" can be identified by finding where the legal efforts intersect with an independent sighting of the same target. Where this …