November 23, 2009 | 11:09 am

Mezuzah restriction-case going to trial

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Photo: Lubavitch.com

This story has gotten a few mentions on the Religion Clause, a must read for anyone interested in the intersection of religion and law. The latest in the mezuzah condo-covenant case, from The New York Times:

The Blochs have lived in the Shoreline Towers condominium in Chicago for three decades. In May 2004, the condo association began a hallway renovation and asked residents to remove everything from their doors, including mezuzot (the plural of mezuzah). The Blochs took the mezuzot down from their three apartments, then replaced them when the renovations were complete. But the condo management removed them, and did so repeatedly so when the Blochs put them up again — even on the day of the funeral of the family patriarch, Marvin Bloch. The family sued the condo association in 2005.

The City of Chicago has since banned condo restrictions on doorway religious symbols, as did the state legislature; the condo board has changed its policy. But the Blochs continued their lawsuit, pressing for damages over their treatment.

A lower court, followed by a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit, blocked the trial last year, but in a highly unusual move, the full court agreed to rehear the case and last week overruled the earlier decision.

A lawyer for the condo complex, David C. Hartwell, noted that the Seventh Circuit relied on an account provided entirely by the plaintiffs for the purpose of deciding if their claims were enough to merit a trial. Now that the case is moving forward, more details will emerge, and “people are going to be somewhat shocked and amazed,” he said.

He insisted that the dispute is about condo board politics, not anti-Semitism. “This case is really about intense discord” between Mrs. Bloch and the board president, he said.

A lawyer for the Blochs, Gary Feinerman, said the facts at trial would vindicate his clients. While not conceding that an anti-Semitic worldview is at issue in the case, he said that even if the actions of the board president were based in personal animus, the president wanted to harm the family, and “he got at them in a way that was intentional religious discrimination.”

The rest here. Like with that soccer deathmatch, this story happened to come up at exactly the same time one of my classes, property, was dealing with this exact of law. I’ll be interested to see how this turns out—and how I do in property.

November 22, 2009 | 6:00 pm

Back when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a fun guy

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

NPR had an interesting story last week about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s days as an American college student. He started at a small Baptist college in North Carolina. That meant chapel and Christian study for the son of an imam.

Then Mohammed moved on to North Carolina A&T State University:

When he wasn’t in class, Mohammed appeared to spend his college years in a kind of self-imposed isolation — about five miles off campus on a residential, tree-lined street. He and the other Middle Eastern students rented several apartments and turned one into a mosque, according to Sammy Zitawi, a friend of Mohammed’s at the time.

“They will just go there and get together and do the prayer and between prayers, if you have a homework problem, they help each other in studying and all this,” said Zitawi, who was also Mohammed’s mechanical engineering lab partner. “They stayed with friends they could blend with.”

Friends they could “blend with” consisted of devout Muslims who avoided the kinds of things you come to expect in college.

“They wouldn’t listen to music, they wouldn’t play music,” says Zitawi. “He wouldn’t take a picture back then because they thought it was against religion.”

While the young men around Mohammed lived in a world apart, it wasn’t an austere existence. Every Friday and Saturday night Mohammed and the other Middle Eastern students used to get together for dinner. There would be prayers, homework and then little skits or a play. The men called it “The Friday Tonight Show.”

Zitawi, who is a now a small businessman in Greensboro, says his friend, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was one of the stars. “This guy was funny, he could make you laugh,” he said. “He could make fun out of anything.”

Read the rest, or listen, here.

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November 22, 2009 | 12:49 pm

How college football is like a Madoff investment plan

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: ESPN

Were college football fans swindled?

This season certainly hasn’t matched up to those in recent years. Remember Appalachian State? Michigan does. Or Tim Tebow and the Florida Gators? They’re still No. 1, but it’s easy to forget.  Maybe the most interesting stories are the undefeated teams no one is paying any attention to—Cincinnati, TCU and Boise State.

What happened to all the hoopla?

Ivan Maisel, writing for ESPN.com, says Bernard Madoff couldn’t have scammed college football fans any better. The connection is tenuous, a bit odd too, but worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:

college football has gone vegan on us. More weeks than not, the schedule included no meat. We’ve gotten one game a week featuring two Top-25 teams, maybe two.

I want my money back.

I’m having this dream in which the new BCS executive director is not Bill Hancock but Bernie Madoff. The college football season is four weeks from concluding, and I’m still waiting to see the returns it promised me in August.

The preseason rankings? No. 3 Oklahoma is 6-4 and looks good only in comparison to No. 4 USC.

Penn State, the preseason No. 9, lost to the only two good teams it played. And lost both at home. By more than 10 points.

Read the rest here.

P.S. UCLA beat the Sun Devils, and the city might be ours for the taking.

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November 20, 2009 | 9:22 pm

Carrie Prejean ready to sue porn distributor

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

If you thought Carrie Prejean was going away, think again.

I mentioned Tuesday the book tour interview with Christianity Today, during which she said God loves boob jobs. I seems I also missed a report from RadarOnline that alleges there are seven more solo-sex tapes and 30 nude photos of the former Miss California floating around. (No confirmation of that one.) Now one of the Valley’s leading porn companies—if not the leading company—is looking to distribute the first tape that TMZ reported on earlier this month.

Prejean is ready to sue:

“[W]e are writing at this time to inform you that the unauthorized use of any videotapes or photographs of my client will result in her suing for invasion of privacy, including misappropriation of her likeness for a commercial purpose, as well as public disclosure of private facts,” Prejean’s attorney wrote to Vivid co-chairman Steve Hirsch. “She will also sue for intentional infliction of emotional distress and seek full consequential and punitive damages.”

Gotta say I agree with Prejean on this one. Something called privacy or at least the right of publicity. Prejean is enough of a public figure that it’s fair for reporters to dig into her background and learn she’s not who she claims to be. But the distribution of this tape would serve nothing but prurient interests, which is where all discussions of Prejean seem to be going these days.

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November 19, 2009 | 3:48 pm

Unsportsmanlike conduct

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The religion angle here is weak. The story is about a women’s soccer match between the University of New Mexico and Brigham Young University, a Mormon school named after one of the heroes of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, which is a a religion. Therefore ... you’ve got to watch the above video.

What made these acts of violence so fascinating was that in my torts class only the day before we had been discussing what would constitute a battery on an athletic playing field. I contended that when playing competitive sports, participants agree to be subjected to some physical contact that is outside the licit bounds of the game—late hits in football, for instance, or fighting in hockey—and that absent malice there shouldn’t be liability. (Rudy Tomjanovich suing Kermit Washington for almost killing him with one punch on the basketball court might be an anomaly.)

Anyway, all this leads to the outrageously entertaining extracurriculars of the Lobos’ Elizabeth Lambert:

“I still deeply regret it and will always regret it and will carry it through the rest of my life not to retaliate,” said Lambert, a 20-year-old junior on scholarship.

She has watched the video a handful of times and does not recognize herself pulling down Brigham Young’s Kassidy Shumway, Lambert said.

“I look at it and I’m like, ‘That is not me,’ ” said Lambert, a defender and an all-conference academic player. “I have so much regret. I can’t believe I did that.”

After this brief moment of remorse with The New York Times, Lambert gets defensive and tries to blame the negative attention on gender inequality. Seriously:

“I definitely feel because I am a female it did bring about a lot more attention than if a male were to do it,” Lambert said. “It’s more expected for men to go out there and be rough. The female, we’re still looked at as, Oh, we kick the ball around and score a goal. But it’s not. We train very hard to reach the highest level we can get to. The physical aspect has maybe increased over the years. I’m not saying it’s for the bad or it’s been too overly aggressive. It’s a game. Sports are physical.”

She added: “I think the way the video came out, it did make me look like a monster. That’s not the type of player I am. I’m not just out there trying to hurt players. That’s taking away from the beauty of the game. And I would never want to do that.”

Personally, I thought everything in the above video was within the expanded parameters of a competitive game—even soccer—until she yanked the girl down by her pony tail. That looked like she was trying to pop a Barbie doll’s head off.

After the jump, the most unsportsmanlike moments in sports:

Read more of this post

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November 18, 2009 | 6:51 pm

C Street House says so long to tax-exempt status

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Things keep getting worse for the C Street House. TPMmuckraker reports:

Previously, the house—despite being home to numerous lawmakers—had been tax exempt, because it was classified as a church. That arrangement had allowed the building’s owner, the secretive international Christian organization The Family, to charge significantly below market rents to its residents. In recent year, Senators John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) have all reportedly called C Street home.

Natalie Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Office of Tax and Revenue for Washington D.C., told TPMmuckraker that her office inspected the house this summer. “It was determined that portions of it were being rented out for private residential purposes,” she said. As a result, the tax exempt status was partially revoked. Sixty-six percent of the value of the property is now subject to taxation.

For more background on “The Family,” read this interview I did last year with Jeff Sharlet, the only Jew-ish journalist to join the brethren and then write exhaustively about his experiences and the organizations political connections.

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November 18, 2009 | 5:40 pm

Prayers for Obama to die

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Not sure if this is a reference to what Pastor Steven Anderson had to say in September—“Why should his children be fatherless and his wife left a widow, as we read in this passage?”—but CafePress is selling shirts and coffee mugs and bumper stickers that say “Pray for Obama” and site that verse from Psalms that Anderson was referring to.

A little more from Gawker:

The Psalm 109:8 gag is one in what’s becoming a long line of cheekily coded Obama death threats: There was the classified ad someone placed in a Pennsylvania paper hoping that he follows in “the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy,” all of whom were assassinated. And there was the gun-toting New Hampshire teabagger with a sign saying it is time to “water the tree of liberty”—a reference to Thomas Jefferson’s reminder that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the “blood of tyrants and patriots.”

Why not a T-shirt that says, “Will Somebody Please Kill That Guy Already?” The word games are getting tedious. If you want Barack Obama to die and for curses to “come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones,” and for his name to be blotted out in one generation, just say so!

Yikes. Thanks for the link, Sharon.

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November 17, 2009 | 2:11 pm

Prejean talks with Christianity Today about God, gay marriage and boob jobs

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life,” hit bookstores today, though it’s already been a best seller for weeks. But there is another sharply divisive, though far less influential and popular, conservative woman on the book-speaking tour.

Former Miss California Carrie Prejean has been making the rounds. She spoke last week with Meredith Viera about that solo-sex tape and then walked off of “Larry King Live” without actually walking off.

Her interview with my two-time colleague at Christianity Today went much better. So much better it was quoted in one of the grocery store gossip rags. Here’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey asking Prejean about “Still Standing,” becoming an advocate for traditional marriage and a lightning rod for critics:

You wrote that you don’t regret getting breast implants. Have you ever wondered whether it might be incompatible with your Christian faith?

No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with getting breast implants as a Christian. I think it’s a personal decision. I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where it says you shouldn’t get breast implants.

You write that you’re still standing, but do you have any regrets from everything that happened?

No, I don’t have any regrets with anything I said or that happened during the pageant. I think it’s important to know that I will fail, I’m not perfect. We’re all sinners, and none of us are perfect. No one should be pointing the finger, when we fall down we should get up and continue what we should be doing.

Can you comment on the reports that you settled a lawsuit against Miss USA because of sex tapes?

Everything that was discussed in mediation was confidential. There is a video out there of me. I was really young and immature. It was the worst mistake of my life. It was a really stupid, stupid decision that I made. But I take full responsibility for it. Did I think I would ever be a celebrity or that my boyfriend at the time, who I sent it to, would ever blackmail me? No. I think we all make mistakes and we all do things when we’re young that sometimes backfire later in life. I give advice to younger girls in my book because I’ve learned a lot since I was 16 or 17 years old.

You’ve apologized to your fans for posing in some revealing photos. Do you think parents will worry that you’re not a good role model for their children?

No one’s perfect. You’re not perfect, I’m not perfect. Everyone’s made mistakes. So if people want to judge me and say that I’m not a good person because of something I did when I was young, that’s their problem. But what really matters is who I am now. We as Christians need to stick together and realize that the Enemy is powerful, and that there are so many people out there who will try and destroy good people. It’s a crazy world, that’s all I can say. All Christians fall short, and hopefully mothers can hear my story and check their daughters’ cell phones and Facebook pages. Young people are doing it every single day.

Doing what everyday? Nevermind. I’m going to let that one go.

Read the rest of the Q&A here.

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November 17, 2009 | 12:00 pm

‘Going up?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I was watching UCLA play Cal State Fullerton last night—ugh—and this commercial, one of my favorites from ESPN, popped up. I thought I had previously blogged it but couldn’t find any remnant in the archives. Enjoy.

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November 16, 2009 | 5:22 pm

Jews aren’t vampires

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There have been teenagers camping out in Westwood since at least Saturday. Their tents wrap all around the north end of the village, past BJ’s, down LeConte, around the Best Buy and down to the corner where the University Religious Conference center sits.

The reason is sad: “New Moon,” the newest film in the “Twilight” series. The fact there were TV news crews out there Sunday night was even sadder.

You can imagine the line of questioning and the enlightening reports that came forth. No? Me neither. But one story about the “Twilight” series that did catch my attention—beside another on-point “South Park” episode—was this appeal from Rabbi David Wolpe that Jews aren’t vampires. He concludes his five-point argument:

Finally, vampires, I hasten to remind you, are not real. They have a long and startling history springing from the depths of the human imagination, drawing from our fears and from real-world creatures (bats, mostly), but they live in books and movies and powerful projections of our minds. But what they share with the abominable snowman, the Loch Ness monster and political bipartisanship is an essential unreality.

Jews not only are real, they know real monsters. There are things in Jewish history, as Abba Eban wrote, too terrible to be imagined, but nothing so terrible that it didn’t happen. We have known the kind of monsters that turn day into night and have a thirst for blood that puts Nosferatu to shame. They are not deterred by a cross; some have marched beneath it. These days, the world’s demons have a different but equally terrifying aspect. Once you have encountered true monsters, the imaginary ones seem not quite so vivid or frightening.

Vampires are not Jews. Maybe we can allow one powerful, popular trend to be about someone else for a change?

Read the rest here.

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November 16, 2009 | 3:32 pm

Adding prayer services to healthcare bill

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It seems most the coverage of the healthcare-reform bill has focused on the abortion amendment hailed as a “major pro-life victory.” But this provision, mentions by the Los Angeles Times, is worth giving a second glance:

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments—which substitute for or supplement medical treatments—on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”

It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill—Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing.

Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science Church official, said prayer treatment was an effective alternative to conventional healthcare.

“We are making the case for this, believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality,” said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging support for the measure.

“We think this is an important aspect of the solution, when you are talking about not only keeping the cost down, but finding effective healthcare,” he said.

The provision would apply only to insurance policies offered on a proposed exchange where consumers could shop for plans that meet standards set by the government.

But critics say the measure could have a broader effect, conferring new status and medical legitimacy on practices that lie outside the realm of science.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group of atheists and agnostics that promotes separation of church and state, said the opportunity to receive payment for spiritual care could encourage other groups to seek similar status.

“This would be an absolute invitation to organize,” Gaylor said.

The Times seems to suggest that this would be a problem. Maybe it would be, but I like what Michael McConnell, who heads the Stanford University Constitutional Law Center, had to say:

“as long as patients are the ones who choose, and religious choices are given no legal preference or advantage, the proposals would appear to be consistent with constitutional standards.”

Regardless, it’s not clear whether this provision will make it through the Senate, which is now working on its version of the healthcare reform bill passed by the House.

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November 16, 2009 | 10:20 am

Orthodox rabbinical student wins boxing title

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yuri Foreman (Photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)

Good thing it’s getting dark early these days. Saturday night, after Shabbat had ended, Yuri Foreman won the WBA junior middleweight crown—after 12 rounds becoming the first Israeli to grab a boxing title belt:

“Before I entered the ring my wife, Leyla, told me: ‘Yuri, can I ask you something? Do me a favor, finish it quickly with a knockout,’” he told his father. “I knew why she asked me this, I knew it’s hard for her to see me in a fight long enough to take several blows. I also thought I wanted to end it with a knockout.”

Foreman told his father how he prayed and said Pslams until he had his rival on the ropes, losing his balance. “I saw him wobbling,” he said. “I knew another blow or two and I would send him to the floor and win with a knockout, but then the bell sounded, ending the round and saving him.”

Foreman is a rare combination of power and smarts. He comes from a poor family that immigrated to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His father works in Haifa as a mechanic, but Yuri moved to New York nearly a decade ago. A few years later, he began studying in a Brooklyn yeshiva to become an ordained Orthodox rabbi.

He has a very strict schedule, studying Torah in the morning and doing intense physical training both inside and out of the ring in the afternoon. He does a lot of weight lifting, running and fitness training.

I previously mentioned Foreman in a post about boxing’s Jewish history. It’s rich. Just like basketball.

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