Opinion ID: 3025336
Heading Depth: 6
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Does a RLUIPA Equal Terms plaintiff need

Text: to show that it is “similarly situated” to a secular comparator that was treated better? The District Court held that Lighthouse could not prevail on its RLUIPA Equal Terms claim because it could not identify a similarly situated nonreligious comparator. Lighthouse contends this was error and urges us to take the position that a plaintiff, asserting a violation of the Equal Terms provision, needs to show nothing more than that the challenged land-use regulation treats one or more nonreligious assemblies or institutions better than a religious assembly or institution, without regard for the objectives of the regulation or the characteristics of the secular and religious comparators. We conclude that the District Court was correct in construing RLUIPA’s Equal Terms provision to require a plaintiff to do something more than identify any nonreligious assembly or institution that enjoys better terms under the land-use regulation. Nevertheless, we find that the court erred in requiring the religious plaintiff to point to a secular comparator that proposes the same combination of uses. As we will explain, what the Equal Terms provision does in fact require is a secular comparator that is similarly situated as to the regulatory purpose of the regulation in question – similar to First Amendment Free Exercise jurisprudence. It is undisputed that, when drafting the Equal Terms provision, Congress intended to codify the existing jurisprudence interpreting the Free Exercise Clause. See 146 Cong. Rec. S7774 (July 27, 2007) (Senate Sponsors’ statement) 25 (sections 2(b)(1) and (b)(2) “enforce the Free Exercise rule against laws that burden religion and are not neutral and generally applicable”). Under Free Exercise cases, the decision whether a regulation violates a plaintiff’s constitutional rights hinges on a comparison of how it treats entities or behavior that have the same effect on its objectives. As the Supreme Court held in Smith, regulations that are neutral and of general applicability are presumptively valid under the Free Exercise clause even if they impose an incidental burden on the exercise of religion. Smith, 494 U.S. at 878-79. A regulation does not automatically cease being neutral and generally applicable, however, simply because it allows certain secular behaviors but not certain religious behaviors. The impact of the allowed and forbidden behaviors must be examined in light of the purpose of the regulation. In addition, when a government permits secular exemptions to an otherwise generally applicable government regulation, the Free Exercise Clause requires that the government accord equal treatment to religion-based claims for exemptions that would have a similar impact on the protected interests. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Lukumi makes this point clear. That case involved a challenge by practitioners of the Santeria religion to a series of city ordinances prohibiting the animal sacrifices that are part of Santeria rituals. The Supreme Court held that the ordinances, taken together, were neither neutral nor generally applicable, but rather had been “gerrymandered” to prohibit almost exclusively the religious sacrifice of animals; none of the city’s aims in enacting the ordinances (preventing cruelty to animals and limiting the health 26 risks caused by improper disposal of animal carcasses and consumption of uninspected meat) could warrant prohibiting the killing of animals in religious rituals while allowing, among other secular activities, hunting, fishing and the use of rabbits to train greyhounds. Lukumi, 508 U.S. at 536-7. Focusing specifically on a zoning ordinance that prohibited the slaughter of animals outside the areas zoned for slaughterhouses, the Court pointed out that it made an exception for “any person, group, or organization that slaughters or processes for sale, small numbers of hogs and/or cattle per week ” and remarked that the city had “not explained why commercial operations that slaughter small numbers of hogs and cattle do not implicate its professed desire to prevent cruelty to animals and preserve the public health.” Id. at 545 (internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, the reason the ordinance was suspect was not merely because it allowed secular versions of the religious behavior it prohibited, but because both behaviors impacted the city’s declared goals in the same way. The unequal treatment of equally detrimental behaviors is what caused the violation of the Free Exercise clause. This Court’s Free Exercise opinions in Fraternal Order of Police v. City of Newark,170 F.3d 359 (3d Cir. 1999), Tenafly, 309 F.3d 144, and Blackhawk v. Pennsylvania, 381 F.3d 202 (3d Cir. 2004), confirm that we have consistently understood Free Exercise analysis to include an examination of the comparators’ relation to the aims of the regulation. First, in Fraternal Order of Police, we examined a challenge by Muslim police officers against the Newark Police Department’s requirement that they shave beards that they wore for religious reasons. The declared aim of the Department’s no-beard policy 27 was to impose a uniform look on its police force. Id. at 366. The policy exempted two classes of individuals: undercover officers and uniformed officers who wore beards for medical reasons. We held that the medical exemption made the regulation subject to heightened scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause because it “indicate[d] that the Department ha[d] made a value judgment that secular (i.e., medical) motivations for wearing a beard are important enough to overcome its general interest in uniformity but that religious motivations are not.” Id. Importantly, however, we also made it clear that the policy’s other categorical exemption, for undercover officers, did not raise Free Exercise concerns. The Department clearly had no interest in making its undercover officers easily identifiable as police, and thus that exception did not “undermine the Department’s interest in uniformity.” Id. Similarly, we held in Tenafly that the township’s selective enforcement of its prohibition against affixing signs to utility poles suggested “a discriminatory intent” because the township routinely allowed, among other things, house number signs, orange ribbons supporting one position in a controversy over school regionalization, and directional signs bearing crosses to show the location of churches, but it denied permission to an Orthodox Jewish group to affix lechis, religiously significant items, to the poles. Tenafly, 309 F.3d at 165-167. Again, however, we were careful to note that not all exceptions to the facially neutral rule were troublesome, only the ones that bore the same relation to the purposes of the regulation, i.e., preventing clutter, as did the prohibited lechis. Thus, the Borough of Tenafly’s exception for cable and telephone wires did not make the regulation any less neutral or 28 generally applicable because “utility poles exist to facilitate telecommunications” and therefore “utility wires are obviously unlike any of the other materials [Tenafly had] allowed people to affix to the poles.” Id. at 168 n.29. The same principle held true in Blackhawk. There, we examined the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s refusal to waive a wildlife permit fee for a Native American who kept two bears for religious reasons although the statute contained categorical waivers for zoos and “nationally recognized circuses.” Blackhawk, 381 F.3d. at 211. In holding that the statute violated the Free Exercise clause, we focused on the fact that categorical waivers for circuses and zoos – exemptions intended to “serve the Commonwealth’s interest in promoting commerce, recreation, and education” and which “undermine the interests served by the fee provision to at least the same degree as would a [religious] exemption” – were available, but the Commonwealth refused to extend an individual religious waiver, which would have served “these or analogous interests.” Id. We see that the Free Exercise jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and of this Court teaches that the relevant comparison for purposes of a Free Exercise challenge to a regulation is between its treatment of certain religious conduct and the analogous secular conduct that has a similar impact on the regulation’s aims. In each case, a regulation’s preferential treatment of secular behavior that did not affect the regulation’s purpose in the same way as the prohibited religious behavior did not raise Free Exercise concerns. Heightened scrutiny was warranted only when a principled distinction could not be made 29 between the prohibited religious behavior and its secular comparator in terms of their effects on the regulatory objectives. Thus, the District Court was correct in holding that the relevant analysis under the Equal Terms provision of RLUIPA must take into account the challenged regulation’s objectives: a regulation will violate the Equal Terms provision only if it treats religious assemblies or institutions less well than secular assemblies or institutions that are similarly situated as to the regulatory purpose. There is no need, however, for the religious institution to show that there exists a secular comparator that performs the same functions. For that reason, the District Court erred in focusing on Lighthouse’s inability to identify a secular comparator with a similar range of uses.11 11 Because we construe the statute to conform to the contours of Free Exercise jurisprudence with respect to this aspect, we need not reach the question whether Congress would have exceeded its powers under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, under which the Equal Terms provision is enacted, by mandating maximum-possible favorable treatment for religious institutions without regard for legitimate governmental objectives. See City of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 519 (Congress may use its power under Section 5 to enforce the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, but may use its power only to “enforce” a constitutional right, not to substantively alter it. “Legislation which alters the remedy of the Free Exercise Clause cannot be said to be enforcing the Clause.”) Because we limit the statute in this way, we are not 30 To support its position that a RLUIPA Equal Terms plaintiff does not need to identify a comparator, however, Lighthouse relies on the opinion of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Midrash Sephardi, 366 F.3d 1214, and the recent Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision following it, Vision Church, United Methodist v. Village of Long Grove, 468 F.3d 975 (7th Cir. 2006). Nevertheless, we agree with Long Branch, the District Court, and the United States (which appeared as amicus curiae in this case) that we should decline this invitation to adopt the Eleventh Circuit’s expansive reading of the statute. In Midrash Sephardi, two Orthodox Jewish synagogues challenged a zoning scheme which, like the one at issue here, prohibited churches and synagogues within the Town of Surfside’s two-block business district while allowing theaters, restaurants, private clubs, and other secular uses. Surfside defended the zoning ordinance on the basis of its need to “invigorate the business district and . . . create a strong tax base through its retail district.” Id., 366 F.3d at 1221. The District Court concluded that the ordinance did not violate RLUIPA because the permitted secular assemblies and institutions were not similarly situated to churches and synagogues: “private clubs provid[e] more of a social setting [and] provide more concerned about Congress’s authority under Section 5 to impose what amounts to a strict liability standard on regulations that violate the Equal Terms provision. The dissent, however, does not limit its interpretation of section 2(b)(1) to Free Exercise jurisprudence and for that reason we doubt the viability of the dissent’s interpretation. See footnote 14 infra. 31 synergy for the shopping district in keeping with the purpose of [the ordinance].” Id. at 1230 (quoting Midrash Sephardi v. Surfside, No. 99-1566-CIV, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 22629, at -33 (S.D. Fla. July 13, 2000) (Midrash Sephardi I)). In reaching this conclusion, the District Court relied on Justice Harlan’s “natural perimeter” test, developed in Walz v. Tax Comm’n, 397 U.S. 664 (1970), under which a regulation is considered neutral and presumptively valid under the religious clauses of the First Amendment if its “circumference . . . encircles a class so broad that it can be fairly concluded that religious institutions could be thought to fall within the natural perimeter.” See Walz, 397 U.S. at 696 (Harlan, J., concurring). The District Court reasoned, in the case of the Surfside ordinance, that the regulation generally allowed uses that would advance its aims while prohibiting a varied group of uses, including “churches, synagogues, educational or philanthropic institutions (including museums), parking lots and garages, public and governmental buildings and public utility/public service uses.” Midrash Sephardi I, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2262 at . The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit disagreed with the District Court’s reasoning. It concluded that RLUIPA’s plain language provided the statute’s own definition of the “natural perimeter” for a valid land-use regulation, namely, “the category of ‘assemblies or institutions.’” 12 Id. In other words, 12 The court looked simply to the dictionary for a definition of “assembly” as “a company of persons collected together in 32 according to the Eleventh Circuit, all assemblies and institutions “travel” together under RLUIPA: if a zoning regulation allows a secular assembly, all religious assemblies must be permitted. See id. at 1230-31.13 See also Vision Church, 468 F.3d 975, one place and usually for some common purpose (as deliberation and legislation, worship, or social entertainment)” and “institution” as “an established society or corporation: an establishment or foundation esp[ecially] of a public character,” id. at 1230, quoting Webster’s 3d New Int’l Unabridged Dictionary 131, 1171 (1993). 13 Having created this broad scope for “equal terms,” the Midrash Sephardi court then incorporated the Smith-Lukumi line of precedent, requiring strict scrutiny to determine if the ordinance was in fact neutral and generally applicable, concluding it was not, first because both overinclusive and underinclusive with respect to its goals of spurring commercial development in the business district and second because the documents showed the motivations for the synagogues’ activities played a role in the town’s thinking. Id. at 1233-35. We prefer, however, to interpret section 2(b)(1)’s “equal terms” as directed to “similarly situated” comparators in regard to the regulatory purpose of the ordinance, see supra, and to reject the Midrash-Sephardi court’s adoption of a broad scope comparator and its addition of a “strict scrutiny” element to be incorporated into RLUIPA § 2b(1), see Part II.B.3 supra. As we conclude in Part II.B.3, the incorporation of “strict scrutiny” into section 2(b)(1) is inconsistent with its express language. We surmise that the Midrash-Sephardi court required a strict scrutiny 33 1003 (holding that a plaintiff making a claim under RLUIPA section 2(b)(1) need not identify a nonreligious comparator that is “similarly situated in all relevant respects”). But see Konikov, 410 F.3d 1317 (limiting Midrash Sephardi to facial challenges and holding that a similarly situated secular comparator must be identified for as-applied challenges). We are not persuaded by the reasoning of the Eleventh Circuit. Its reading of the statute would lead to the conclusion that Congress intended to force local governments to give any and all religious entities a free pass to locate wherever any secular institution or assembly is allowed. Thus, under the Eleventh Circuit’s interpretation, if a town allows a local, tenmember book club to meet in the senior center, it must also permit a large church with a thousand members – or, to take examples from the Free Exercise caselaw, it must permit a religious assembly with rituals involving sacrificial killings of animals or the participation of wild bears – to locate in the same neighborhood regardless of the impact such a religious entity might have on the envisioned character of the area. See Lukumi, 508 U.S. at 520; Blackhawk, 381 F.3d 202. We believe this result would be contrary to the text of the statute and to the expressed intent of Congress. We conclude instead examination in order that its holding conform to existing Free Exercise case law – see footnote 11 supra. However, we believe that, unlike the Midrash-Sephardi court, we have come to a constitutionally acceptable interpretation of section 2(b)(1), following its express terms, without incorporating additional terms into it. 34 that a religious plaintiff under the Equal Terms Provision must identify a better-treated secular comparator that is similarly situated in regard to the objectives of the challenged regulation.