#IN THE HOUSE IN A HEARTBEAT COVER SERIES#
In 2015, The Satanic Temple began a series of lawsuits against the state of Missouri, where women seeking abortions must view sonograms and then review a booklet stating, “The life of each human being begins at conception. The Satanic Temple’s seven tenets include the belief that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” It interprets state restrictions on abortion access as a burden on this sincerely held religious belief. Texas is home to four congregations of The Satanic Temple, more than any other state.Īlthough The Satanic Temple does not believe in or worship a literal Satan, they revere Satan as described in the works of English poet John Milton and the Romantic movement, an intellectual movement that originated in late 18th-century Europe, as a powerful symbol of rebellion against authority. The Satanic Temple began in 2013 and has launched a number of political actions and lawsuits related to the separation of church and state. The Satanic Temple’s seven tenets include the belief that one’s body is subject to one’s own will alone. This decision inspired The Satanic Temple by linking the question of religious liberty with that of reproductive rights. Hobby Lobby that under RFRA, the federal government could not require the Christian company Hobby Lobby to fund insurance that provided their employees with certain forms of birth control. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. So many states, including Texas, passed similar legislation, sometimes called “mini-RFRAs.” Flores, the Supreme Court ruled that RFRA applied only to the federal government and not to individual states.
#IN THE HOUSE IN A HEARTBEAT COVER FREE#
Under RFRA, the government cannot burden the free exercise of religion unless: 1) it has a compelling reason for doing so, and 2) the government acts in the least restrictive way possible to achieve its purpose.įour years later, in Boerne v. In response, Congress wrote the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law in 1993. With this decision, it appeared that the free exercise of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment meant very little.
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The court ruled that freedom of religion was no excuse from compliance with a generally applicable law – a law that applies equally to everyone and does not single out specific groups. Smith considered arguments that a member of the Native American Church had a religious right to use peyote, a controlled substance.
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The 1990 Supreme Court case Employment Division v. Proponents of the bill claim that since no state official is enforcing the law, abortion providers have no one to sue. Critics of the law claim this is an intimidation tactic designed to threaten the clinics with so much potential liability that legal abortion becomes impossible.īut outsourcing enforcement to the public is also intended to protect the state.
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Second, the law allows anyone to sue those they can accuse of “aiding and abetting” an abortion for US$10,000. Most women are not aware they are pregnant before six weeks, and Texas abortion providers estimate 85% of abortions in the state are performed after this period. Texas’s new law was designed to effectively shut down all abortion while protecting the state from judicial review.įirst, the bill bans abortion after six weeks – the point at which Texas lawmakers claim a fetus’s heartbeat can be detected. However, states can still pass laws that severely restrict access to abortion. Casey in 1992, the Supreme Court established that abortion is a Constitutional right. As a scholar who studies the ways in which The Satanic Temple’s provocations affect public debates about religious freedom, I anticipate their latest legal argument will challenge some assumptions about RFRA and the freedoms it was designed to protect. Like the Heartbeat Bill itself, The Satanic Temple’s efforts to circumvent abortion restrictions on religious grounds involve a creative and complicated legal strategy. RFRA laws, which came into effect in 1993, restrict the government’s ability to burden religious practices.
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In response, The Satanic Temple, a nontheistic group that has been recognized by the IRS as a religion, announced that it would fight back by invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, to demand exemption from abortion restrictions on religious grounds. Supreme Court declared it would not block the law. Texas’s controversial anti-abortion law known as the “Heartbeat Bill” went into effect at midnight on Sept.