by Dave Stafford for www.theindianalawyer.com

An argument over dinner has taken on First Amendment religious-freedom and disability-protection dimensions before the Indiana Supreme Court.

Justices Monday heard arguments in Fishers Adolescent Catholic Enrichment Society v. Bridgewater, 990 N.E.2d 29 (Ind. Ct. App. 2013), vacated. Fishers Adolescent Catholic Enrichment Society, an organization of parents who home school, sponsored a dinner-dance for students at which the Bridgewater family requested a steak dinner be served to their daughter. Because of food allergies, she couldn’t consume the chicken dinner that had been arranged, and FACES leaders requested the Bridgewaters bring their daughter’s meal.

After FACES failed to accommodate the request, the Bridgewaters filed a discrimination claim with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission. A few days, later the Bridgewaters were excluded from the group. The ICRC ruled FACES unlawfully discriminated by expelling the family in retaliation for a disability claim. The Court of Appeals affirmed a $2,500 fine, but struck an ICRC order that FACES post the decision on its website and elsewhere.

Arguing for FACES, Patrick T. Gillen said the agency lacked jurisdiction and erred because the group’s mission wasn’t “related to education” as the statute requires.

“We believe the civil rights law has been applied in a way that’s inconsistent with the First Amendment,” Gillen said. The ICRC, he said, had engaged in “second-guessing membership decisions” of a private religious group that has a right to self-determination as it relates to membership, and that the ICRC made “an unprecedented intrusion” into private decision-making.

The Bridgewaters’ attorney, Nelson Nettles, said the case has little to do with religion.

“They like to keep shifting the focus to religious matters,” he said. “We’re talking about discrimination against people with disabilities. … It was because of the disability complaint that they kicked (the Bridgewaters) out.”

Nettles said the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled repeatedly that “discrimination against people with disabilities has a heavier weight in these kinds of cases.” He cited the SCOTUS case of professional golfer Casey Martin, in which justices ruled the Professional Golf Association could not enforce a rule forbidding the use of golf carts to bar Martin from the tour. Martin claimed a disability requiring the use of a cart.

Justice Robert Rucker asked Gillen if he could think of a case in which the ICRC would have jurisdiction over FACES. He said he couldn’t, but there might be.

Justice Mark Massa pressed Nettles on whether he would concede that the Court of Appeals was correct in rejecting what Massa called “the public shaming” the ICRC ordered – that FACES post its decision. But Nettles said statute allowed ICRC to make such an order. “It’s one of the few remedies that actually benefits my client,” he said.

During rebuttal, Gillen attacked the assertion that FACES retaliated against the Bridgewaters, arguing that the ICRC’s administrative law judge found, for instance, that the family “did in fact meddle with arrangements” for the dinner-dance and were “undermining the group.”

But Rucker suggested to Gillen this was an invitation to reweigh the evidence.

Gillen said the decision to exclude the Bridgewaters wasn’t a case of discrimination or retaliation, but rather a matter of “home-schooling mothers who said, enough is enough.”

Justices raised several hypotheticals that threw both attorneys, including whether a private, evangelical Christian group could exclude members of other faiths, whether the level of a group’s organization or the type of someone’s disability would be factors in applying the civil rights statutes, and whether the ICRC could intervene if someone was denied admission to the group rather than being excluded later.

Chief Justice Brent Dickson focused the final question for Gillen on the statutory language that subjected groups to ICRC jurisdiction if their mission is “related to” education. “That language chosen by the Legislature is awfully broad,” he said.

By: Brad Linzy

This morning I awoke to a Facebook feed peppered with controversy over Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl ad, which featured a multicultural mix of people, all presumably Americans, singing “America the Beautiful” in their native tongues.

Most negative commenters seem to think it is in some way blasphemous to sing “America the Beautiful” in any language other than English.

“If I didn’t hate Pepsi so much, I wouldn’t buy another coke,” went one Facebook post. “SPEAK ENGLISH!” went another. And so on. There is really no way around it these comments are provincial, isolationist, and xenophobic.

I have news for these commenters… The 21st Century economy is a global one. Coca-Cola is a global corporation, the third most valuable brand in the world. They did not get that way by alienating foreign buyers of their products. They employ over 150,000 people on every inhabited continent in the world. While it is true the flagship product, Coca-Cola, is an American invention, and while it is true Coke is still headquartered in America, its product range caters to a global consumer. It is just this type of global perspective that has allowed Coke to remain competitive the world over. It stands to reason their ads would try to reflect an inclusiveness of all consumers.

Whether we like it or not, modern globalization means we must be inclusive if we want our goods and services to meet with the widest possible market. Whether rural America knows it or not, the major population centers of America are not all white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, they are a multicultural mixture representing all corners of the globe.

If the capitalist arguments don’t convince the xenophobic mob thrashing the “American the Beautiful” ad, then perhaps the words to the song will. The final words of the familiar first verse speak overtly of God’s ‘grace’ and of ‘brotherhood’, while the rarely sung second verse glorifies the spirit of ‘pilgrims’, who were themselves just immigrants searching for freedom from persecution and prejudice:

“O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!”

Clearly Katharine Lee Bates, the song’s librettist, did not intend her inspirational poem to be a source for division between people. Rather, it is clear her vision of America is one of inclusiveness and fraternity, a sentiment altogether absent from the negative comments.

It makes one wonder how ugly the response would have been if Coke had decided to run its original “Reasons to Believe” ad during the Super Bowl. This ad, currently running in some world markets, features clear antiwar sentiments and a gay couple being married. http://youtu.be/u4KUaiGCmG

I guess we will all have to wait for Coke’s next quarterly report to find out if this controversy helps or hurts their bottom line. This capitalist, for one, wishes them all the best.