Opinion ID: 427394
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Final Balance

Text: 48 In discussing the process for reaching a final balance we noted earlier that courts are frequently forced to undertake an ad hoc balancing when existing free exercise doctrine does not command a specific result. But, such ad hoc balancings need not always be based only on appeals to a court's basic intuitive sense. Fortunately, the instant case arises in a factual context in which substantial, relevant case precedent exists to guide our balancing. This case is not the first to involve balancing government's interest in restricting the location of religious conduct. Prince v. Massachusetts, supra, 321 U.S. at 169, 64 S.Ct. at 443, upheld the convictions of a Jehovah's Witness for violating child labor laws. State law prohibited children from selling anything in the streets. The defendant, the custodian of a nine-year-old girl, asserted the child's free exercise rights to sell religious literature on public streets. The defendant claimed that the child's distribution of literature accorded with religious tenets of the Jehovah's Witness faith. The Supreme Court held the state's interest in children's welfare permitted the state to wholly prohibit children from selling religious literature on the streets. With respect to adults, the Court observed that although the literature distribution could not be altogether banned, it could be regulated within reasonable limits in accommodation to the primary and other incidental uses [of streets]. Id. at 169, 64 S.Ct. at 443. 49 International Society for Krishna Consciousness v. Eaves, 601 F.2d 809 (5th Cir.1979) involved the Society's First Amendment challenge to a municipally owned airport's restrictions on distribution of literature and solicitation of funds. Accepting the Society's claim that religious tenets required followers to solicit funds, this Court nevertheless upheld the airport restrictions. Government may regulate place and manner of religious expression as long as there is no content classification and so long as the regulation is reasonable. Id. at 827. Admittedly, restriction of religious conduct on public streets and in airports is less burdensome than restriction of such conduct on an individual's property. The Prince and the Krishna cases, however, establish the principle that government can exercise its police powers to limit the place and manner of religious conduct, despite a significant burden on free exercise. 50 A decision from the Sixth Circuit, Lakewood Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses v. City of Lakewood, 699 F.2d 303 (1983), gave that principle specific application in a zoning context. In Lakewood, a church congregation challenged a zoning ordinance that prohibited their building a church on a lot they had previously purchased. The Sixth Circuit characterized the infringement on religious freedom as an inconvenient economic burden and a subjective aesthetic burden. The City of Lakewood's interest in creating residential districts to promote its citizens' health and well being was held to outweigh the congregation's religious interests. We think Lakewood's balancing process reached the correct result in a case very similar to this one. The Sixth Circuit faced, if anything, a closer balance than the one called for today--as opposed to the one half of Miami Beach territory where Appellees may conduct their religious services, the City of Lakewood permits church buildings on only around ten percent of its land. 51 We glean a final bit of support for our holding from a Supreme Court dismissal for want of a substantial federal question in Corporation of the Presiding Bishop v. City of Porterville, 338 U.S. 805, 70 S.Ct. 78, (1949). The state court had held that churches may be excluded from residential areas consistently with the free exercise clause. Justice Vinson, writing in a later case, American Communications Ass'n v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 397, 70 S.Ct. 674, 94 L.Ed. 925 (1950), explained the Supreme Court's dismissal in the California case. 52 When the effect of a statute or ordinance upon the exercise of First Amendment freedoms is relatively small and the public interest to be protected is substantial, it is obvious that a rigid test requiring a showing of imminent danger to the security of the nation is an absurdity. We recently dismissed for want of substantiality an appeal in which a church group contended that its First Amendment rights were violated by a municipal zoning ordinance preventing the building of churches in certain residential areas.