May 2009

On April 20, the Supreme Court granted the government's petition for certiorari, in United States v. Stevens (05-2497), a case that pits a 1999 federal law prohibiting the depiction of animal cruelty against the First Amendment's protection of free expression.

In 2005, Robert Stevens, a pit bull enthusiast and proprietor of a Web site called Pitbulllife.com, was convicted under the federal law, for selling videos of pit bull fights and pit bulls attacking other animals. The law, Section 48 of Title 18 of the US Code, prohibits:

the sale, or possession of a depiction of a live animal being intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded or killed, with the intention of placing that depicting in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain, where the conduct depicted is illegal under Federal law or the law of the State in which the creation, sale, or possession takes place, and the depiction lacks serious religion, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.

Congress passed the law in response to "crush videos," which usually featured a woman stepping on and crushing to death small animals. Congress was aiming to dry up the market for such videos.

A federal court in Pennsylvania found Stevens in violation of the law. An undercover police sting operation purchased from Stevens three videotapes depicting pit bulls hunting prey, fighting each other in Japan (where dog fighting is legal), and footage of dog fights from the 1960s and 70s. Stevens included voice-over narrations for all three tapes, and observations pertaining to both pit bull physiology, and the cultural and historical significance of dog fighting.

In his piece "The Blossoming Union of Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Freedom," Prof. Ira Lupu, an ACS contributor, recently offered his analysis of the complex recent history between marriage equality and religious freedom:

In the fight over Proposition 8, social conservatives used arguments about religious freedom as a sword. Their most prominent arguments were spectacularly overstated. Some proponents of Prop 8 warned, for example, that recognition of gay marriage would lead to hate speech prosecutions of anti-gay pastors, and loss of tax exemption for churches that refused to host same-sex marriages. Though neither of these developments was remotely likely, some voters were apparently moved by these assertions to support Prop 8.