The Houston Animal Rights Case: History Is on the Side of Preaching in the Park

​Houston’s Discovery Green Park is an urban jewel, a 12-acre site with playgrounds, skating rinks, a jogging trail, a music venue, yoga classes, and more. It has everything, except respect for the free exercise of religion.
 
This park has seen no lack of other kinds of protests, from pro-choice demonstrations to anti-NRA protests. But when Dr. Faraz Harsini and Daraius Dubash dared to hold an educational series about factory farming, they each acquired a pair of shiny new handcuffs. Their crime? They showed eye-catching but harmless images of industrial farming practices.
 
Dr. Harsini’s work on animal rights emerges from his work as a scientist. Dubash’s advocacy springs from the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta. For him, ahimsa, or nonviolence against other living things, is a holy teaching. His invitation to tell passersby about animal cruelty was an expression of his deeply held religious beliefs.
 
Is such preaching allowed in a public park?
 
That question allowed Protect The 1st and the Harvard Free Exercise Clinic to embark on a historical quest in an amicus brief in support of Daraius Dubash in his appeal before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. While the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and other groups represent Mr. Dubash and Dr. Harsini before the Fifth Circuit, we thought this was an excellent opportunity to do a deep dive into American history and the question of how religion is protected – or not – in public places.
 
This is an issue that hearkens back to the very beginnings of America.
 
We all know that Puritan settlers fled religious persecution to find freedom on the shores of New England. It wasn’t long, however, before the persecuted became the persecutors. Puritans publicly beat Quakers “like unto a jelly,” cutting off their ears, branding them, and putting them in outdoor stockades. Refugees from the theocracy in Massachusetts carried a heightened appreciation for the rights of others. In Quaker Rhode Island and New Jersey, guarantees of “free exercise” and “liberty of conscience” took root. In 1681, King Charles II famously granted William Penn a charter to found the Province of Pennsylvania as a “holy experiment” in tolerance.
 
Later, the itinerant preachers of the First and Second Great Awakenings – religious revivals that bracketed the Founding – spurred a transformation of American public spaces into places where religious expression flourished. One famous traveling proselytizer, George Whitefield, recognized that disaffected believers “who would not come to a church to hear his message would go to a park.” Whitefield drew a record-breaking crowd of 20,000 to Boston Commons, where he spoke within view of the site where Quaker preachers had earlier been hanged.
 
Then came the Methodists, preachers outside the mainstream who spoke on public land because houses of worship and school buildings were closed against them, leaving them only “the street corner, the public parks, or gardens, the fields, or woods.”
 
As public tolerance grew, so did legal protection for preaching in public. Thomas Jefferson provided the model of the natural right of the free exercise of religion in Virginia, later established for the nation in the First Amendment. The Supreme Court in the 20th century would uphold these rights for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 14 out of 19 cases.
 
Now this right is being tested again, this time for an American preaching ahisma, aided by a portable television, in Houston. We find once again, that when religious expression is violated, the rights of all Americans are at stake. That is our message to the Fifth Circuit.
 
To learn more about the evolution of American law on the free exercise of religion in public places, from colonial times to today, check out our brief.

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