The Man Who Wrestled Death to a Draw

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-man-who-wrestled-death-to-a-drw/387760/

I hope people will always remember & never forget, how EVIL Dave Frohnmayer was too!!

John Calhoun ·   Owner/Partner atInsideValuation

"While I disagreed strongly with his fight against John Kroger over the legal mess at UO dealing with the football coach's contract and some of the other work he did as an attorney for big corporations…"

"..The last one, against Al Smith, defines his legal legacy. Smith and a white co-worker, Galen Black, had been fired from their jobs as alcohol and drug-abuse counselors because they took part in a peyote ritual sponsored by a chapter of the Native American Church. Many scientific studies have show that NAC peyote rituals can be a powerful aid to Native people recovering from alcohol abuse; but the white-led agencies the two men worked for dismissed this ancient religion as hippie-style “drug abuse.” Smith and Black asked for unemployment compensation, but the state fought them tooth and nail. The two men won over and over in the state courts, but Frohnmayer took the case to the Supreme Court twice, and ultimately won."

"History has not been kind to that decision; in the second Smith opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia gutted the Free Exercise Clause, writing that from now on, minority religions burdened, or even outlawed, by putatively “neutral” laws would have to beg legislatures for exemptions; the courts would not even listen to their pleas. That decision was repudiated by Congress not once but twice—once, for general religious-freedom issues, in the Religious Freedom Restoration act and later, specifically for peyote religion, in theAmerican Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994—and also by many state legislatures, including Oregon’s. Frohnmayer’s office had not asked the Court for such a draconian ruling; indeed, the Court did not seek a briefing on the issue or even hint that it was considering such a drastic change in the law. But still, at the time and afterwards, people asked, Why couldn’t Dave have just let it go?

The answer, I think, is complex. First, Frohnmayer was a stubborn man, and fighting for his daughters had made him even more so. He simply did not know how to quit. "