Monkey Business
Stanley Fish
New York Times
In a case now pending in a federal court in Brooklyn, Mamie Manneh of Staten Island stands accused of having brought smoked bushmeat – known colloquially as monkey meat – into the United States without proper permits, in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Ms. Manneh’s defense is that in her religion the eating of bushmeat has both a cultural and a spiritual significance. In an affidavit, 17 of her co-religionists declared, “We eat bushmeat for our souls.” Manneh’s lawyer, Jan Rostal, has analogized the African-based practice to the consumption at a Passover seder of foods like bitter herbs “that might have some reference to the Exodus.” In a motion to dismiss, Rostal said that the case, while apparently novel, “represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the melting pot that is America.”
No, it doesn’t. It represents a more fundamental clash: between the imperatives of religion and the rule of law. The question raised by the case is whether the fact of a religious belief is sufficient to exempt the believer from the application of generally applicable laws — laws (like driving on the right-hand side of the road) that apply to every citizen no matter what his or her religious, ethical or moral convictions. Is religious belief a special case, so special that the devout practitioner gets a pass?
John Locke posed that question in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), and his analysis of it remains relevant today. Locke asks if it is lawful for Meliboeus (a name borrowed from pastoral poetry) to slaughter a calf and offer it as a sacrifice at a religious meeting. It depends, he says, on whether slaughtering a calf in order to put food on his family’s table is lawful. If it is, then killing the calf for ritual purposes is perfectly allowable, for “what may be spent on a feast may be spent on a sacrifice.”
(Continued here.)
New York Times
In a case now pending in a federal court in Brooklyn, Mamie Manneh of Staten Island stands accused of having brought smoked bushmeat – known colloquially as monkey meat – into the United States without proper permits, in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Ms. Manneh’s defense is that in her religion the eating of bushmeat has both a cultural and a spiritual significance. In an affidavit, 17 of her co-religionists declared, “We eat bushmeat for our souls.” Manneh’s lawyer, Jan Rostal, has analogized the African-based practice to the consumption at a Passover seder of foods like bitter herbs “that might have some reference to the Exodus.” In a motion to dismiss, Rostal said that the case, while apparently novel, “represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the melting pot that is America.”
No, it doesn’t. It represents a more fundamental clash: between the imperatives of religion and the rule of law. The question raised by the case is whether the fact of a religious belief is sufficient to exempt the believer from the application of generally applicable laws — laws (like driving on the right-hand side of the road) that apply to every citizen no matter what his or her religious, ethical or moral convictions. Is religious belief a special case, so special that the devout practitioner gets a pass?
John Locke posed that question in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), and his analysis of it remains relevant today. Locke asks if it is lawful for Meliboeus (a name borrowed from pastoral poetry) to slaughter a calf and offer it as a sacrifice at a religious meeting. It depends, he says, on whether slaughtering a calf in order to put food on his family’s table is lawful. If it is, then killing the calf for ritual purposes is perfectly allowable, for “what may be spent on a feast may be spent on a sacrifice.”
(Continued here.)
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