Religious accommodation precedents at national level can justify local-level exemptions

Evidence

I believe that moral obligations are a valid reason for one to be exempt from attending certain events. Otherwise we are preventing every religious person to run for office. An example is the current elections of 2000 in the United States. If Mr. Gore was elected president and Mr. Lieberman as Vice President, we acknowledge that he cannot perform his duties on Saturdays due to his religious beliefs. If Mr. Lieberman was able to be exempt from working on Saturdays while leading the whole nation due to his religious beliefs, why are we to be treated any differently? We are all equal in the eyes of the Constitution and the law. That’s why I am puzzled as to why we are treated differently due to our beliefs. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 387

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the Lieberman Saturday-Sabbath precedent as a test case for how religious accommodation scales from the vice presidency down to a Brooklyn high school student council — the same logic, radically different power context.
• ADDENDUM: Direct extension of the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme: religious accommodation and dress/participation bans as sites where the powerful and the powerless deploy the same constitutional rhetoric, inverted.
• DEEPTHINKING: A high-school student marshaling a national vice-presidential precedent to argue her own case shows how abstract legal equality gets operationalized by ordinary citizens — the Constitution as a tool the powerless can wield against the powerful.
• XREF: connects to: Religious-liberty jurisprudence asymmetrically weighs believers’ burden against outsiders’ harm — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 950; State legislators proposed nullifying federal church-state separation via state law — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 83