How a Muslim's beard might shape Obamacare: Column
Seventeenth-century poet John Donne once famously wrote that "no man is an island." All of humanity is interconnected, he argued: If the bell tolls for me, "it tolls for thee."
Americans would do well to keep Donne in mind when thinking about Tuesday's landmark Supreme Court religious liberty decision in Holt v. Hobbs.
At first glance, the case might seem to have little relevance to most Americans. The case was brought by an Arkansas Muslim prisoner, Abdul Muhammad, who sought to wear a half-inch beard in compliance with his religious beliefs. This request would have been granted in most parts of the country. Almost every other state's prison system would allow Muhammad to wear his beard. But Arkansas prison officials said no, citing a policy banning beards.
At the Supreme Court, Arkansas prison officials argued that their policy was justified by compelling government interests, asserting that prisoners could hide contraband in a half-inch of hair and that they needed clean-shaven prisoners for easier identification. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected these justifications, pointing out that other states had no problem with religious beards. Arkansas officials' "mere say-so" was not enough to meet American civil rights standards.
Why does this matter? Most Americans aren't prisoners, don't live in Arkansas, aren't Muslim and don't wear beards.
When it comes to American law, no religion is an island. Because our laws treat all religions equally, the "rigorous standard" proclaimed by the Supreme Court protecting Muhammad's religious liberty also protects the religious liberty of churches, synagogues and religious individuals across the country.
As government expands its role in all parts of our society, government rules come into conflict with religious people. As government grows, the area of conflict with religious practices expands. The immense number of regulations being issued by the federal government under the Affordable Care Act have spawned plenty of those conflicts. A few years ago, the government did not tell organizations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to violate their religious beliefs by paying for others to use the morning-after pill.
In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Martin Luther King repeated Donne's "no man is an island" idea in different words: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all."
King was pointing out we are all in this together. The same is true here.
Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, was co-counsel in this case.
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