Religion has long played a significant role in shaping societies, influencing culture, traditions, moral values, and community life. For many people, faith provides a sense of identity, purpose, and belonging, and religious institutions have made lasting contributions through education, healthcare, charitable work, and community service. At the same time, history demonstrates that religion has also been a source of conflict and division, particularly when religious beliefs become intertwined with political power. Throughout history, religious ideas and institutions have at times been used to justify wars, persecution, discrimination, and unequal treatment of minority communities. Women have often faced restrictions on their rights and opportunities based on religious or patriarchal interpretations, while LGBTQ+ individuals have frequently encountered exclusion, criminalization, or social stigma justified on religious grounds.
These experiences illustrate why democratic societies continue to grapple with a fundamental constitutional question: how can governments protect every person’s freedom of belief while ensuring that no belief system is given legal or political preference over others?
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The case of Landor v. La. Dep’t of Corr. & Pub. Safety, No. 23-1197, slip op. (U.S. June 23, 2026) sits at the intersection of federal funding law and religious liberty in prisons. At its core, the dispute concerns the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA), a federal statute passed under Congress’s Spending Clause power. RLUIPA says that when states accept federal funds for prisons, they must not substantially burden an incarcerated person’s religious exercise unless the restriction is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest.
Damon Landor, a Rastafarian prisoner, alleges that prison officials violated his religious beliefs by forcibly shaving his head despite knowing that his faith required him to keep his hair uncut. According to Landor, when he was transferred to another prison near the end of his sentence, he provided the new officers with a copy of an order protecting his religious practice. He alleges that the officers disregarded the order, discarded it, and cut his hair anyway. For Landor, the violation was not simply a disagreement over prison policy; it involved the loss of a religious practice that he believed was central to his faith. He sued under RLUIPA, seeking relief against both the Louisiana Department of Corrections and the individual prison officers in their personal capacities.
The key legal question before the Supreme Court was whether RLUIPA’s Spending Clause framework allows prisoners to seek monetary damages from individual state officers who themselves were not parties to the federal funding “agreement.”
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At this year’s State Bar of Arizona Convention, Secular AZ and the Religious Liberty Law Section co-sponsored the panel From Pulpit to Precedent: The Johnson Amendment on Trial.
For seventy years, the Johnson Amendment has prohibited churches and nonprofits from endorsing candidates. Rarely enforced but often debated, the Amendment continues to raise questions about free speech, free exercise, church autonomy, campaign finance, dark money, tax privileges, and the boundaries of church-state separation. Today, courts, the IRS, and litigants on all sides are still testing its limits, creating ongoing uncertainty about how the rule will be interpreted and applied.
Dianne Post, Secular AZ Legal Director, summarizes the experience.
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Join us on April 10 at noon for special guest Amelia Craig Cramer for a discussion of the state of the rule of law and criminal prosecutions in Arizona.
Click here to watch this virtual presentation.
Amelia Craig Cramer is past President of the State Bar of Arizona and retired Chief Deputy Pima County Attorney. Following her retirement, Ms. Cramer served on the Arizona Supreme Court’s Task Force on Ethics for Government Lawyers and on the APAAC Public Law Practice Work Group.
Before joining the Pima County Attorney’s Office, during the first half of her legal career, Ms. Cramer was a civil litigator at large, private law firms: Baker & Hostetler in Washington D.C.; Heller, Ehrman in San Francisco, and Brown & Bain in Tucson. Additionally, she was a leader of two nonprofit legal organizations dedicated to LGBT civil rights: managing attorney of the western regional office of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in Los Angeles; and executive director of GLBT Advocates and Defenders in Boston.
Also, Ms. Cramer taught law briefly as an adjunct professor at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Law and as a guest lecturer at other law schools. Following her retirement, Ms. Cramer volunteered for four years with the NAACP, serving as its Arizona State lobbyist and vice president and criminal justice committee chair of its Tucson Branch. Ms. Cramer is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Stanford Law School.
Focusing on the provision of gender-affirming care, Health Care Civil Rights analyzes the difficulties and potential of discrimination law in healthcare settings. The application of civil rights law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the US, but conservative challenges and the complex and fragmented nature of our health care system have limited the real-world success of this strategy. Revealing deep divides and competing interests that reverberate through patient experiences, insurance claims, and courtroom arguments, Anna Kirkland explains what health care civil rights are, how they work in theory and practice, and how to strengthen them.
