USC Program on Religious Accommodation Launched

Prof. Nomi Stolzenberg named director the program   By Gilien Silsby When Arizona recently considered a measure that would allow merchants to refuse service to gay and lesbian customers by citing religious beliefs, a national debate sparked over the proposed law. Was the bill simply protecting civil rights of business owners with deeply held religious views, or was it fueling blatant discrimination? Although the bill was vetoed, the ever-expanding issue of religious accommodation is changing how civil rights law is viewed and interpreted across the country. With that in mind, the USC Program on Religious Accommodation recently launched to bring together an interdisciplinary mix of scholars to examine the emerging question of accommodation. “Advocates for civil rights now recognize that religious exemption claims represent the new frontier in the war on anti-discrimination law,” said Nomi Stolzenberg, director of the Program on Religious Accommodation and a USC Gould School of Law professor. “At the same time, advocates for religious rights see the fight for religious accommodation as their civil rights movement,” she added. “Our goal is to overcome the fractured, polarized discourse that too often prevails in discussions of religious accommodation.” USC’s Program on Religious Accommodation is supported by schools and research centers across campus, including USC Gould School of Law, Annenberg School for Communication,  the Center for Law, History and Culture, the Center for Religion and Civic Culture,  the CRCC Interdisciplinary Research Group, the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics and the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics. In addition to holding seminars and discussions at USC, the program is sponsoring events at other institutions, including the three-day conference “Religious Accommodation in the Age of Civil Rights” at Harvard Law School April 3-5. Nationally recognized scholars in the fields of sexuality, gender, and law and religion will discuss how current controversies over marriage equality, antidiscrimination law, and the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate have raised conflicts between religious claims and equality. “The goal of the program is to deepen understanding of all parties,” Stolzenberg said. “This issue is not going away – in fact it is exploding. We want to be on the forefront of the discussion.” Stolzenberg said she intends to bring disparate parties to the table for “uncomfortable discussions” that rarely take place in academia. “Because of the issues currently dominating the debate, there is a tendency to assume that religious accommodation is always a conservative cause,” she said.  “But claims to accommodation are made by diverse groups in diverse contexts, and the political implications and public policy implications of religious accommodation are complex.  Only by broadening the canvas to look comparatively and historically at the issue, and by bringing together scholars with expertise in different fields, can we begin to forge the interdisciplinary framework that is needed to overcome the fractured discourse that currently shapes the debate.” Upcoming events include seminars on the differential treatment of Muslims, led by Sherman Jackson, USC’s King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Literature, and religious accommodation claims in the media and popular culture, led by Diane Winston, USC’s Knight Chair in Media and Religion, and Hilary Schor, USC professor of English, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Law. In Fall 2014, the program will host Chai Feldblum, a commissioner with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commissionand expert on employment discrimination and disability rights, who will deliver a public lecture on the topic of “Accommodation and Employment Discrimination,” an event commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title VII.