Holy Litigation, Batman!

Literally.

In 1990, the Supreme Court decided Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith, which was a major decision outlining the relation between church and state. Smith and another man applied for unemployment benefits after being fired for "misconduct" - using peyote. They did so, as members of the Native American Church as part of a religious ritual. Their claim was denied, but the Oregon courts overruled, holding that such actions unduly burdened their right to religious freedom under the First Amendment. The Supremes disagreed and, in an opinion by Scalia, held that neutral laws of general application don't violate the First Amendment if they happen to infringe on some religious practice.

This made many religious folks quite upset (Oregon, IIRC, changed their own law to accommodate the practice). That led Congress to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993 and, after that was struck down by the Supremes, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act in 2000. Several states also passed their own versions of the RFRA (see here for more details). The upshot of this legislation was to make it easier for believers to carve exceptions to general laws that infringed on some religious obligation. In the case of the RLUIPA, it was specifically designed to apply to inmates in prison.

All that background may put the lawsuit discussed in this Daily Mail article in a little better light. A man doing time at Mount Olive for sexually abusing a child has filed suit claiming that his right to practice a Native American religion is being violated by prison administrators. He almost certainly won't win every request (the sweat lodge is a no hoper, I think), but a lot of his claims seem legit. At least under the heightened scrutiny that the laws discussed above require.

Not surprisingly, the comments to the article are filled with ignorant rantings about how prisoners don't have any rights. Of course they do, but that's not even the point. If a Christian was denied a Bible or something similar, I imagine many of those same folks would be up in arms about the injustice of it all. So many cons seem to find Jesus/Allah/Batman in prison, after all. Those folks need to realize that if you're going to bend over backwards to accommodate religion at all, you gotta' bend over for everybody, at least somewhat.