VICTOR LAVALLE
By now it’s a cliché to hear about the conversation between a black parent and child where the parent tells the child she’ll have to be ten times better—or a hundred times better—than her white peers if she wants to succeed in the United States. This has become a commonplace, damn near boilerplate, which is actually heartbreaking if you slow down and think about it. So let’s do that, shall we?
The underlying point of this parental wisdom, of course, is that the cards are stacked against the black or brown person in the workplace, in school, even in line at the supermarket. Your standard is different from someone else’s and, to make it worse, those other people won’t even acknowledge it. My wife and I see this in school interactions where our son and the other brown-skinned boys are singled out as problem kids. Meanwhile, their white male friends are described as “energetic” or “enthusiastic.” To use a sports analogy (please forgive me if you hate sports), the goalposts aren’t set at the same distance.
Again, this sounds like a cliché, a point so obvious that one risks making other people’s eyes roll. But something magical happens when you don’t simply take such a thing for granted, when you hammer home the thuddingly clear truth every time: people can’t ignore it if you keep reminding them. I suspect that’s what clichés are actually meant to do: to hide something in plain sight. It’s the kind of clever plan that would make a James Bond villain gasp with envy. This country doesn’t treat everyone equally? That’s, like, so obvious. Why do we even have to talk about it?
The Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye and Ernesto Pichardo v. the City of Hialeah came before the Supreme Court on November 4, 1992, and was decided on June 11, 1993. The facts of the case go like this: In April 1987, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye leased a plot of land in Hialeah, Florida. There they planned to build a church. In theory this shouldn’t be a problem—America, land of religious liberty and all that—but the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye is part of the Santeria religion. You may begin to see the problem now.
Or maybe you don’t. I shouldn’t presume. To this day, many people’s idea of the Santeria faith comes from some throwback horror movie like The Believers or the 1988 horror movie The Serpent and the Rainbow or the 1987 horror movie Angel Heart. Sensing a pattern? (Not to mention that the last two are actually about Voodoo, or Hollywood voodoo, but people tend to mix up both Santeria and Voodoo into a general “bad” religion category.)
The point of most of those movies seems to be that the practitioners make soul-selling deals with evil forces, they often indulge in highly sexualized rituals, and they make bloody sacrifices of animals.
The first one of these is untrue, the second really a matter of perspective, and the last, unfortunately for the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, turns out to be true. Animal sacrifice is an aspect of the Santeria faith.
Which brings us to the town of Hialeah, Florida, and how the townsfolk reacted when the church leased a plot of land with the intention of building a church in the Santeria faith.
Hialeah went batshit.
This particular form of batshit came in the form of the Hialeah city council passing four ordinances aimed at the church and its practices. Two of them “forbade the offering of sacrifices, a sacrifice being defined as killing an animal unnecessarily in a public or private ritual or ceremony, and not for the sole purpose of sustenance.” The third ordinance forbade the keeping of animals intended for sacrifice. And the last “confined the slaughtering of animals to a slaughterhouse.”
Soon the American Civil Liberties Union represented the petitioners.
Now I have no doubt there are plenty of people who don’t see an issue here. The practice of animal sacrifice may seem cruel, downright evil, and any laws that banned the practice fall on the side of righteousness for those who sympathize. But you have to remember what I wrote about the goalposts, the changing of standards based on whom, exactly, one is evaluating. The ACLU joined the fight on behalf of the church because it simply wasn’t up to the Hialeah city council to decide which religion’s practices were deemed lawful and acceptable and which ones were, as they say, beyond the pale.
Pete Rivera, a Santeria high priest, was quoted in a USA Today article that focused on this case. Rivera “says the animals he sacrifices die more humanely than animals killed in slaughterhouses.” Anyone who has even casually learned about the conditions in American slaughterhouses would be hard-pressed to argue. And yet the Hialeah ordinances made sure to preserve the rights of slaughterhouse owners. There wasn’t even a clause about making sure those slaughterhouse deaths were handled with any care.
Another point made in an article in the spring 1993 issue of Reform Judaism underscored the hypocrisy: “There is no question that these ordinances do single out those who kill animals out of obedience to religious command, while not touching those who kill animals for any other reason—for food, scientific research, pest control, euthanasia for sick pets, animal population control, or hunting for sport. Can the government ever forbid for religious purposes an activity it freely permits for all kind of non-religious purposes?”
The answer to this question should be obvious, but those Hialeah ordinances were upheld in 1989 by a US district judge and, two years later, “a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of appeals unanimously affirmed this ruling.”
Talk about having to be one hundred times better than your peers! When I read about this case, I found myself reeling at the idea of how hard these judges must have contorted themselves to miss the intentional targeting of a specific religion.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where, I’m happy to say, the nine justices unanimously called bullshit on those lower court judges and the wack-ass city council of Hialeah. They struck down the ordinances as clear violations of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
I’d like to point out that these nine judges were almost all appointed by Republican presidents: Reagan, Nixon, and Bush appointed seven of the nine justices. You had guys like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, no friends of Santeria I am sure, who still had to concede—or outright defend—the right of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye to practice its faith as its adh