Author Profile: Jeff Breinholt
Author Archive for Jeff Breinholt
The waning days of 2009 saw the possible loosening of Utah liquor laws as a national story. Meanwhile, in a development covered by Mormon Matters, the Deseret News suggested that 2009 marked the end of a decade that saw the growing influence of Mormonism in American culture. What was the LDS experience in 2009 in one particular institution – the American courts? After all, court opinions are at least one indication of the larger attitude towards a minority group.
In 2009, I counted around 50 federal and state court opinions involving the LDS Church and its members. (This does not include cases where the Church is named in a cited opinion and where the Church or its members were not otherwise involved in the controversy). This count is slightly down from prior years; in 2007 and 2008, there were 71 and 63 cases, respectively. Many of these 2009 cases fall neatly into the various topics I have been writing about over the past few months. Continue reading…
Back in 1976, it looked like the LDS Church was going to enjoy a $156 million windfall. The reason? It was the death of billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes, who apparently executed a will leaving one-sixteenth of his estate to the Mormon Church and another one-sixteenth to a man named Melvin Dummar.
The claim, which was ultimately rejected by a court in Nevada, went like this.
During the last week in December of 1967, Dummar was driving in the late evening in rural Nevada. He pulled off of the main road for a short rest and found a man lying in the road. The man was clearly in distress. Dummar offered to help him, at the man’s request, and drove him to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. During the ride to the Sands Hotel, the man identified himself as Howard Hughes, the industrialist. After Dummar left the Sands Hotel in December of 1967, he never again had contact with the man who had identified himself as Hughes. Continue reading…
Remember Kenneth Starr? He was the former judge-turned-special-prosecutor who tried to drive Bill Clinton out of office with tawdry tales involving the President’s dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The LDS Church hired Starr, now the dean at Pepperdine Law School, more recently to promote their equities in the California state skirmishes over same-sex marriage. The Church simultaneously relied on a less well-known Salt Lake City lawyer (and 1993 BYU Law grad) named Alexander Dushku, of the law firm of Kirton & McConkie [1]. 
This interesting anecdote raises the question: Who are the LDS Church’s chosen litigators? Continue reading…
The 1960s was a time of turmoil in the United States. This turmoil extended to American college campuses. It focused on the Free Speech Movement and civil rights in the south, and gradually extended to the U.S. involvement in the war in Southeast Asia. Some American colleges remained unmolested by the times. One was Brigham Young University.
This would not last. In the late 1960s, BYU became the focus of protests at its athletic competitions, over the LDS Church policy of barring blacks from the priesthood. Continue reading…
The task was simple. Get a list of the area’s religions and invite them to a Cobb County Planning Commission meeting. The clerk went to the Yellow Pages and did her job, with one exception. She intentionally passed over three entries in the directory: the Muslims, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Mormons [1].
The Muslims, we might understand. The Jehovah’s Witnesses? They don’t serve in the military, salute the flag, or vote, and there is a rumor they are not supposed to serve as jurors. But the Mormons? They pride themselves on being good American citizens. Why would they be excluded from civic functions like this? Continue reading…
John Boyle was offended that his country club scheduled golf tournaments on Sunday. He was a Mormon who kept the Sabbath day holy. So he sued. Boyle v. Jerome Country Club, 883 F Supp 1422 (D.Id. 1995)
Christina Axson-Flynn was studying acting at the University of Utah. A Mormon, she was uncomfortable that the school’s acting exercises required her characters to utter some dirty words. So she sued. Axson-Flynn v. Johnson, 151 F Supp 2d 1326 (D. Utah 2001).
Boyle and Axson-Flynn both claimed that their First Amendment rights were violated. That part of the Constitution, in addition to forbidding the government from establishing religions, prohibits it from interfering with the free exercise thereof. Continue reading…
One might think that property, a uniquely secular notion, has no truck with ecclesiastic authorities. After all, there’s supposedly no property in Heaven. Instead, everything is free up there, and there’s no such thing exclusive use and the right to refuse. Jesus said …. never mind.
To show how daft the notion of property is to matters of religion, consider a case I stumbled on recently. In it, the court said:
Plaintiff, God, claims that Defendant [Arizona State] university is infringing his copyright by using his “autobiography,” namely, “Bible,” without paying him royalties. Complaint at 2. Plaintiff seeks 9.3 million dollars in damages…The Court finds these allegations to rise to the level of being both fanciful and factually frivolous; accordingly, the Court will dismiss the Complaint without using the Marshals for service, nor putting Defendant to the task of responding to the Complaint [1].
In Maine, Judge Clapp was not pleased. The sarcastic comment he made at an October 6, 1998 custody hearing would get him in trouble. He would ultimately face accusations that he harbored anti-Mormon animus.
Well which church? There seems to be a lock on the Mormon Church in this case … which we all know has a lock on family values in the entire world.
Thomas Vaughn Barlow really does not like the IRS. On June 8, 2007, he sent it a letter, which stated:
This means that if you do not answer me lawfully and take my money or property or in any way continue to harass me or fail to assure me of my being secure in my persons, houses, papers and effects, that I’m justified in acts of war to balance your terrorism. Do you get it? I will kill any of your agents I can find. I will blow up your buildings. This is war.
Barlow is a Mormon. Well, sort of. He was part of the Fundamentalist LDS Church, at least before he got kicked out. Was his letter not a little over the top? The jury thought so. He received a 21-month prison sentence [1]. Continue reading…
The chagrin would be immediate from reading these words in a law book:
For five years, in defendant’s capacity as a schoolteacher, neighbor, and secretary to the Bishop of the Mormon Church, defendant molested numerous boys in Santa Clara County. As charged in this case, he touched the private parts of four boys who knew him variously as a family friend from church, a teacher in kindergarten and grades two and three, and a home-school religion teacher.
So starts People v. Harward [1]. It’s no joke. This language, taken from a real court case, likely sent shivers down the spines of the Mormons who read it, not to mention Church leaders. Is there a reason to worry? Is Mormon leadership bound to contend with the same public relations nightmare that plagued the Roman Catholics over the last decade? Continue reading…
As I am hardly the model of mental health myself, I am generally loathe to describe others as crazy. However, one cannot read all of the American court opinions involving the Mormon Church – as I have been doing over the last year or so – without being struck by how many of them involve individuals who seem a little off. Judging just by the four corners of the written opinions, either these people have problems, or they are getting advice from some very bad lawyers. It raises the question that might be difficult for some Mormons to face: does the LDS Church bring out the delusional is some people who might be predisposed to such syndromes? If so, because these are such sad stories, how can it be prevented? Continue reading…
In an earlier mormonmatters post (here), I examined the rise of Mormons as criminal defendants in court opinions. Not surprisingly, most LDS criminals do not give up their religious affiliation once they go behind the wall. Instead, they find themselves with plenty of time on their hands. They often use that time to act as their own lawyers. What are the deprivations over which Mormon prisoners have gone to court? How do they compare with other similar American religions? Continue reading…
Religious discrimination in the workplace is barred in the United States. It has been that way since the 1960s. This prohibition is across the board, and applies whether the employer is a public or private entity. If you discriminate against your employees on the basis of religion, you could easily end up as a defendant in federal court, sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many states have anti-discrimination laws as well.
Of course, we know about the persecution of Mormons in the 19th Century and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1930s and ’40s. We also know that the Seventh-Day Adventists honor the Sabbath on Saturday, which sometimes causes employment problems for them. Given this history, we could expect that these religions would be the natural beneficiaries of the federal workplace discrimination remedies.
Guess again.
Are Mormons more often criminals than members of other similar religions? This is a question we will never answer with precision. After all, one’s religion is not asked when booked for a crime. For an accurate assessment of interreligious rates of criminality, such data would be a necessary condition to doing some per-member calculations.
However, we might estimate an answer by examining court opinions arising from criminal prosecutions. This method is admittedly a soft proxy. Criminal opinions reflect only a small portion of all criminal prosecutions, and they refer to a defendant’s religion only when it is somehow injected into the proceedings. Still, what these opinions say about the relative criminality of certain religions is interesting, as is the examination of how these cases vary over time. By looking at the number of “Mormon defendant” criminal cases, we might see whether there is an uptick in Mormon-committed crimes or different ways in how Mormons, compared with members of other faiths, choose to defend themselves when charged with crimes. Continue reading…
We know that the LDS Church has projected itself around the world through its missionary efforts. This has occurred during a time when U.S. immigration law was becoming more refugee-friendly. Perhaps it is inevitable that we would start to see cases where individual Mormons seek asylum here in the United States, based on fear of persecution in their home countries. How do these LDS asylum cases compare with asylum cases involving churches with which Mormons are commonly confused – the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Christian Scientists? Continue reading…
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