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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Does anyone have a link to something explaining how communities like Kiryas Joel and various Amish / Mennonite towns exist in a legal sense?

It seems to me that they would be in constant violation of eveything from the mundane - say, fire code in buildings - to the serious - unreported child abuse etc.

They are in violation of these things and you could write several pages of all their infractions. Everything from declaring a personal dwelling a religious building (a Chabad rabbi does this in my own town and probably your town if you live in NJ, check the property records), to violating agreements on utilities, to simply not teaching English in schools. In Kiryas Joel (“low income”) they have their own private security that will illegally attempt to stop you if you walk through their town as a woman without the proper attire… welfare schemes involving Haredi usually result in sweetheart deals with no jail time…

there’s not really an explanation beyond “Haredi block vote and block-lobby and use all of their money to ensure the illegal flourishing of their group”

A google search on the FLDS would inform you that doing this is a more general habit of cults, and getting away with it is more a matter of general internal cohesion than block voting.

Of course, I don’t disagree. But FLDS is 6k unsophisticated people in the middle of nowhere, and the Hasidic community in Jersey/NY is perhaps ~250k quite sophisticated people who have ties of advocacy to a larger community of fellow travelers. I just looked it up and I see I have been misusing the term “block vote” (I wonder if it morphed into a different colloquial meaning around here) but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

This Is Not Uncommon

The FLDS basically gets away with it- with even other Mormon polygamist groups advocating against them. Geographic distance is probably part of it but it’s also just hard to police groups that don’t want to be.

The Amish are actually exempted from quite a few laws in the parts of Pennsylvania they're in. The Haredi generally take over the government of the towns they dominate; it's good to be the king mayor.

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

I'm not trying to be combative here. I just think it's wild that the US essentially tolerates a few mini-cults within our own borders because ... quilts?

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

You agree with Justice Scalia circa 1990 on this, but it's a nuanced issue that has been going the other way in recent years.

Basically there's tension between the Free Exercise clause, the Establishment clause, and the all-encompassing state. When a general law steps all over a religious practice, it's hard to decide whether exempting the religion violates Establishment, or not exempting them violates Free Exercise.

Yes, actually? The First Amendment is often seen to cut both ways: it prevents the establishment of religion, but also prohibits enforcing secularism on the public.

It was broadly seen to include religious exemptions to generally applicable laws until Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, at which point Congress passed the RFRA near-unanimously, saying "actually, we meant to apply strict scrutiny to laws burdening the practice of religion". At its core, allowing Native Americans to use peyote for their religion, or the Amish to opt out of Social Security (some groups even object to the assignment of SSNs to people!), or Sikh soldiers to grow beards.

In practice, some of the Internet atheism crowd chafe at Christians taking advantage of the RFRA, but I'd say it's general use cases are fairly popular. But it also swings close to self-contradiction in legal arguments, like Trinity Lutheran: the state can't prevent churches from applying to generally available playground improvement funding.

They control the towns they’re in, local government has a lot of power in the US, and statehouses are extremely easily corrupted given most politicians are small-time local people who are never subject to much scrutiny.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

If the answer is, "Yes", then my assumption would be this doesn't happen much because of the immense social pressure in these communities to not call the police. Would that be accurate?

The FLDS is definitely subject to secular jurisdiction and has had specific laws passed in states they live in to make it easier for law enforcement to obtain probable cause on them. Still doesn’t work because of internal cohesion to not involve the police.

For sure, I think it’s a perennial feature of all highly insular religious communities that they’re suspicious of police and that they tell children from an extremely young age never to involve secular authorities. Even if they knew how, doing so would destroy their entire lives; they don’t even speak English as a first language, they would find it hard to exist in the secular world.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

Yes, Kryas Joel is not literally an autonomous state immune to US law. Just like the FLDS and Amish communities are not exempt from US laws. In practice, local law enforcement prefers to leave them alone and avoid political shitstorms unless they absolutely have to step in.

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