I don't practice Santeria

What do you do when religious freedom and animal cruelty intersect? South Florida is facing that dilemma head on, mixed in with a healthy dose of good old American xenophobia.

Noriel Batista has had little peace since a swarm of Coral Gables police officers burst onto his property, disrupting a Santeria ritual intended to initiate him into a special order of his religion's priesthood.

"It has ruined my life," said Batista, a Cuban-born pharmacy owner who bought the home on Casilla Street nine years ago.

Business at his Coral Way pharmacy has suffered, he says. Neighbors expressed outrage that animal sacrifices -- in this case, 11 goats and 44 fowl -- were taking place in the City Beautiful.

Shortly after the June incident made the news, Batista received a handwritten note, scrawled in the margins of a Miami Herald article: America has become a dumping ground for trash like you. Go back to Cuba and take your animal sacrifices with you.

The incident, which brought television cameras and patrol cars to the quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in early June, highlights the tension between adherents of a religion most notorious for its practice of animal sacrifice and neighbors in the increasingly affluent suburban areas where the religion is spreading and taking root.

This is an extremely difficult issue. On the one hand, it should go without saying that, in America -- yes, even Drunky McStagger's America -- everyone has the right to practice any religion they like, or not to practice any religion at all. On the other hand, well, Michael Vick. (In other words, it's difficult for me to justify animal sacrifice, even in the name of religion.)

The article continues:

Practitioners of Santeria, most notably Ernesto Pichardo, the South Florida priest who won a landmark Supreme Court decision sanctioning animal sacrifices, say the complaints -- and official reaction to those complaints -- come from a misunderstanding of his religion at best, outright bigotry at worst.

"When we hear about Santeria in Coral Gables, it's as if Santeria doesn't have a right to be in Coral Gables," said Pichardo, the head of the Church of Lukumí Babalú Ayé. His members were performing the disrupted June ritual to initiate Batista into the order of Balogún, entitling him to conduct animal offerings, a sacred precept of the religion that traces its roots to West Africa.

"But it's OK if it's in Little Havana, or it's all right if we do it in Hialeah," said Pichardo. "As long as it is marginalized, and only appears in the lower strata of society, then it's OK."

Pichardo has asked Coral Gables mayor Don Slesnick for an official apology and religious sensitivity training for the department's police force. Slesnick, who drew kudos from scores of residents for speaking out against the sacrifices, said he is respectful of santeros. "I have requested that the city attorney do an exhaustive investigation of the current status of the law," he said.

"We not only have to observe the constitutional right for religious freedom, but we have to also concern ourselves with the quality of life in our neighborhoods," he said. "There is the safety and health issue, sanitation issue dealing with dead animal carcasses."

Santero priest Jesús Suárez, who helped officiate the ceremony at Batista's home, said he tried to explain to officers that they were interrupting a religious event. It was only after several hours and a consultation with the Miami-Dade state attorney's office that police allowed Suárez and another priest to continue.

"They ordered us out of the house, desecrated a holy space, treated us like criminals," he said.

Neighbors said that while they respect Batista's right to practice his faith, they wish he would not be so public about it.

"I just think they should do those things away from neighborhoods, where there are no kids and nobody can see those things," said Ricardo Celiz, a sports anchor for Univisión's Spanish-language broadcast network, TeleFutura. His family, including two small children, lives four houses away.

"And definitely I don't want them to see any dead animals at that house," he said.

So it appears that essentially it boils down to a "not in my back yard" attitude. In much the same way that the Bush crime syndicate and their supporters provide "free speech zones" for protests, people want Santeria kept away from them, hidden from view, "out of sight, out of mind." I can't help but wonder how the Roberts Court would rule on Pichardo's animal sacrifice case ...

And so ultimately I find myself coming down on the side of freedom of religion. We're not entitled as Americans to dictate how or where one worships, any more than we can decide whether one worships or where one may exercise free speech.* I personally may find animal sacrifice abhorrent, but is it therefore my right to restrict the religious use thereof? In order to be true to my own values, I must answer that question with an emphatic no.

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* Of course, there are other factors, like public safety, that properly affect our First Amendment rights. Such factors are beyond the scope of this post.