ABSTRACT
On 11 June 1993, the US Supreme Court unanimously overruled a set of ordinances passed some six years earlier by the City of Hialeah, a Cuban-dominated, largely bluecollar incorporated city within the Greater Miami metropolitan area. Though two lower courts had previously upheld these ordinances, the Supreme Court found that they unlawfully suppressed practices protected under the US Constitution’s First Amendment’s guarantee of Freedom of Religious Exercise. The practices in question were what adherents of the Afro-Cuban religion regla ocha or Santería call dar de comer al oricha (‘to feed the god[s]’), and consider indispensable to the maintenance of humandivine relations. As Chief Justice Kennedy correctly stated, though powerful, the deities of regla ocha are not immortal: They depend for survival on the sacrifice [of animals]’. Moreover, ‘[g]iven the historical association between animal sacrifice and religious worship’, the court’s opinion continues, the ‘petitioners’ assertion that animal sacrifice is an integral part of their religion cannot be deemed bizarre or incredible’ (Justice Kennedy, quoted in New York Times, National Edition, 12 June 1993). If so, the City of Hialeah had overstepped the bounds of its legitimate authority. By prohibiting ‘to unnecessarily kill, torment, torture, or mutilate an animal in a private or public ceremony not for the primary purpose of food consumption’ (Ordinance 87-52, City of Hialeah), it had tampered with behaviours which the nation’s founding document explicitly locates beyond the reach of its power to prosecute. By placing the Santeros’ catering to their deities’ appetites under constitutional protection, the Supreme Court turned Hialeah’s law-makers into law-breakers.
