by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I am the product of a southern home. I grew up in Los Angeles, but my mom was from Washington, D.C., and I am the first member of my father’s family born outside the Confederacy. The rules I was taught were southern rules.

One of them had to do with “polite conversation.” I was taught there were three things you never discussed in polite conversation: sex, politics, and religion. If you were having dinner with the neighbors or ran into Mrs. Murphy at the fabric store,¹ those topics were not touched on.

I’m still a little uncomfortable with them, and I try to make this column “polite conversation.” So before I discuss religion with you, I have to set out the ground rules.

Contrary to public belief, I am not an adherent of the Jehovah’s Picnickers. I do not believe you cannot get into heaven unless you show up with a covered dish and a bow tie or are able to recite from a language that has to be read from right to left.

Other than that, my beliefs are pretty much indistinguishable from a “mainstream faith.” But the key word in that phrase is not “mainstream,” it is “faith.”

In my theology, nothing pertaining to God or gods can be proven. If it could be, you wouldn’t need faith. Logic would be enough.

But evidence and logic isn’t enough. Not for me. I went to a Catholic high school (I was their first, and at the time, their only non-Catholic) and a Jesuit college;² a lot of very fine minds tried to convince me there was proof for their religious beliefs. They failed.

So I chose my faith based on whether it had doctrines that appealed to me and its expediency. Nobody believed all the things I believe, and I wasn’t going to choose a faith that imposed dietary restrictions or required pilgrimages during the baseball season. That’s how I ended up where I am theologically.

When that’s your “faith journey,” you can’t be too critical of others. Don’t mistake my lighthearted treatment of these issues. I describe myself as a man of faith, and the phrase means something to me.

I just don’t care about your faith. I don’t care where you worship, or on what day, or what you eat, or what you believe. If I feel the need to judge you, I’ll find some other basis for it.

I simply can’t conceive of a God who decides eternal reward or damnation based on whether you checked the box that said Methodist or the box that said Hindu. And if She really cares about whether you correctly answered the question on transubstantiation, She’s part of somebody else’s afterlife.³

Alright. So now you know that if my discussion of Zielinski et al. v. New York Department of Corrections, a freedom of religion case, seems to you to favor one faith over another, it’s wholly unintentional. And you know that when I don’t have a deadline looming, I don’t joke about religion.

But the Zielinski case needs to be discussed. By me. In 1500 words. By Tuesday.

It’s a case that was spawned⁴ by April’s total eclipse. Seems Jeremy Zielinski was a guest of the Department of Corrections of New York State, and he wanted to see the eclipse. When the department announced a system-wide lockdown⁵ during the eclipse, he sued, arguing that observation of the eclipse was important to his religion and the state was denying him his First Amendment right to practice it.

And what religion is Mr. Zielinski, you ask? A druid? A naturalist? A Jehovah’s Picnicker?

No, Mr. Zielinski is an atheist.

Which brings us to an important question: Can you have a freedom of religion case that does not involve religion?

I’ve looked up a lot of definitions of religion in the last hour. They all go something like this: “the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a God or gods.”

Mr. Zielinski has no such belief. He does not engage in such worship.

Now I know the law engages in a ton of fictions. We ascribe First Amendment speech protection to lots of things that don’t involve speech. Our descriptions of “interstate commerce” endow those two words with an elasticity that would have astonished my high school English teachers.⁶

But extending “freedom of religion” protection to an atheist’s desire to watch an eclipse seems like a stretch to me. (I get to say this because—spoiler alert—the case settled. While a sitting judge cannot comment on “pending or impending cases,” this one is neither. The parties settled it.)

And that settlement was probably made easier by the fact Mr. Zielinski roped in a half-dozen “co-religionist” plaintiffs.⁷ And who, you ask, would be a co-religionist with an atheist?

Good question. I couldn’t have answered that question before. But this case has taught me. The answer is: A Baptist.

And a Muslim.

And a Santerian.

And a Seventh-day Adventist.

I can’t speak for a lot of those people, but my dad’s family includes more Baptists than a Baylor University prayer service, and none of those people would share a pew with an atheist.

But somehow, Mr. Zielinski got them all to join in his request for an injunction. He ended up with six plaintiffs of faiths as divergent as The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.⁸

And the Great State of New York caved. They cancelled the lockdown. Jeremy Zielinski and his Merry Men got to see the eclipse.

Well . . . at least they got to be outside when the eclipse happened. I was outside in the Great State of New York when the eclipse happened. Right in the middle of the path of totality. I saw nothing but cloud cover.

So while the inmates were able to cow the New York Department of Corrections, I’m not sure whether they were equally successful against the Elysium Department of Meteorological Phenomena. I’m not sure any religion recognizes injunctions against its Supreme Being(s), and I saw no reports about the weather at the Woodburne Correctional Institute during the big event.

But they got to try.⁹ And at a time when there is so much discussion in our country about whether one man can be above the law, there’s something reassuring about having it demonstrated that no man can be below the law. Even a state prison inmate who eschews religion and seeks to be allowed the right to practice his non-religion merits the attention of the law.

Sing Hallelujah, Brother!

BEDS NOTES

1. My mom made all my shirts when I was a boy. God, I hated those trips to the fabric store. “What kind of buttons do you want for the shirt with the sailboats on it, Billy?” Thought but never expressed answer, “I don’t care, Mom. Use thumbtacks. Just get me outta here so I can go play ball.”
2. “Oh, don’t go to Loyola,” said one of the Franciscans who taught at my high school. “Loyola’s a Jesuit school; pick a Catholic school.”
3. I like my wife’s idea that there must be multiple heavens “because if I end up in the same place as Jerry Falwell, it won’t be heaven for either one of us.”
4. That seems the right word to me.
5. A reasonable precaution when things are going to suddenly go dark in all the prisons.
6. And Miss Tamura, who worked so hard to teach me parts of speech in fifth grade.
7. I put “co-religionist” in quotation marks for reasons that will soon become apparent.
8. And you know how those folks feel about each other.
9. No, I do not know whether New York issued eclipse glasses to them.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.