UNNECESSARY

Hundreds of thousands of Yoruba people were taken from West Africa to Cuba as slaves. Their religion went with them, and in order to survive, it took cover. The Court’s words: their “traditional African religion absorbed significant elements of Roman Catholicism. The resulting syncretion, or fusion, is Santeria, ‘the way of the saints.’”

The people who keep it call it Lukumí. Officialdom, the Court included, wrote it Santeria, flat and unaccented. This casefile keeps the flat spelling on purpose. The flattening is the subject.

The orishas were still there. They were behind the Catholic saints. A devotee could stand in front of an image the church approved of and be praying to something older than the ship.

That is not a metaphor about hiding. It was hiding. The Court says so: “Santeria adherents faced widespread persecution in Cuba, so the religion and its rituals were practiced in secret.”

They hid, and it worked, and they are still here.

Coming out

In April 1987, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye leased land in Hialeah, Florida, and announced what it intended to build on it.

Not just a house of worship. Also, in the Court’s list, “a school, cultural center, and museum.”

A museum. A congregation that had spent generations practicing where nobody could see now proposed to explain itself in public, to teach its children in the open, and to put its history behind glass where anyone could come and look at it.

The city of Hialeah held an emergency public session and began passing ordinances.

What the ordinances say

They do not say Santeria.

That is the craft. A law that names its target can be attacked. A law that does not has to be caught.

Ordinance 87-71 does not forbid killing an animal. It forbids sacrificing one. And then it defines sacrifice, and the definition is where the word is hiding: “to unnecessarily kill, torment, torture, or mutilate an animal in a public or private ritual or ceremony not for the primary purpose of food consumption.”

The prohibition is one word wide. Everything that matters is in the definition underneath it.

Read it cold and it sounds like an animal welfare statute. Nobody is for torture. Nobody is for mutilation. The words are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, which is to make you nod before you understand what happened.

Because the sentence contains two escape hatches, and everything depends on who is standing in them.

The first is ritual or ceremony. The law does not restrict killing. It restricts killing in a ritual. A man may kill an animal all day for reasons the city likes. He may not kill one while praying.

The second is unnecessarily.

Who decides what is necessary

Somebody has to. The word does not decide itself.

The Supreme Court went and found out who did, and wrote down the answer:

“Killings for religious reasons are deemed unnecessary, whereas most other killings fall outside the prohibition. The city, on what seems to be a per se basis, deems hunting, slaughter of animals for food, eradication of insects and pests, and euthanasia as necessary.”

Necessary: hunting.

Necessary: killing rats in your house.

Necessary: putting down a stray.

Unnecessary: worship.

Note what is not on that list, and note why. Fishing happens in Hialeah and fishing is legal, and the Court observed that nothing in the record showed the city had ever concluded that fishing for sport was unnecessary. It never had to. The question was never put to the fisherman. A man may take a boat out on a Saturday and kill a fish because he enjoys it, and the law never thinks to ask him anything. A man may kill the same animal in the presence of his god, and the law is waiting with a form.

And there is one more exemption, which the Court names directly. The ordinance spares “the primary purpose of food consumption,” and the Court records that the requirement narrows the prohibition further, “in particular by exempting kosher slaughter.”

Here is the practice itself, as the Court describes it: “The animals are killed by the cutting of the carotid arteries in the neck. The sacrificed animal is cooked and eaten, except after healing and death rituals.”

The animal is eaten.

The rite produces food. It should have walked straight through the food exemption. It did not, because of the phrase primary purpose, which asks a question no butcher is ever asked: why, in your heart, are you doing this?

The kosher butcher is not asked. The fisherman is not asked. Only the man at the altar is asked, and only his answer is wrong.

What the Court said

Justice Kennedy did not leave it to inference. And he reached for the essay’s own word to say it.

“It is a necessary conclusion that almost the only conduct subject to Ordinances 87-40, 87-52, and 87-71 is the religious exercise of Santeria church members. The texts show that they were drafted in tandem to achieve this result.”

A necessary conclusion. The city spent four ordinances deciding what was necessary, and the necessary thing, in the end, was the finding against it.

Drafted in tandem. Written together, to fit around one congregation, the way a mold fits around the thing it is cast from.

The ordinances were struck down. The Church won.

But the instrument was never confiscated. A city that wants this outcome does not need to write Santeria on anything. It needs a word like unnecessary, and a list of exceptions long enough to look like even-handedness, and the patience to let the last name in the net be the only one it wanted.