"Why is it that prosecutors and prison administrators are among the first to understand that extreme religious liberty is dangerous and antithetical to core American values?"

"The answer is that many religiously motivated criminals appear in their courts and jail cells. Accordingly, they understand through experience that religious liberty sits atop a slippery slope that lands in the criminal code and a well of human suffering."

Writes lawprof Marci Hamilton in a tribute to the recently deceased. David Frohnmayer, former Oregon Attorney General, Dean of the University of Oregon Law School, and President of the University of Oregon.

Thankfully, Frohnmayer was the Attorney General of Oregon when Employment Div. v. Smith was litigated, because he had the knowledge and wisdom to argue that the drug counselors in that case � who had signed an agreement not to use illegal drugs or they would lose their jobs, and then used peyote as part of a religious ceremony � did not have a First Amendment free exercise right to break Oregon�s criminal laws or to receive unemployment compensation.

Unfairly maligned then and still by those who are so blinded by ideology they refuse to see the facts, history will lionize him for his role in Smith....

Smith is the reason why statutes like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act were passed. It said that there's no right under the Free Exercise Clause to exemptions from the neutral, generally applicable actions of government.