LOUISIANA
The Times-Picayune
[Louisiana Supreme Court ruling]
By Julia O’Donoghue, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on July 11, 2014
As he considers a run for president in 2016, Gov. Bobby Jindal has spent quite a bit of time articulating his concerns about religious liberty in the United States over the last six months.
“One of the most important struggles of our time is to stand up for our First Amendment religious liberty rights,” he said at the Iowa Republican State Convention in June.
The governor has accused President Barack Obama and other Democrats of waging a battle on American religious freedom several times during appearances around the country. He made the issue a central theme of his commencement speech at Liberty University in Virginia this May. It was also the thrust of his talk at the Ronald Reagan library in California last winter.
But Jindal, a practicing Catholic, is declining to weigh in on a high-profile legal case involving religious freedom that is happening in his own hometown and involves his own church diocese.
A Louisiana Supreme Court ruling could potentially force a priest from the Baton Rouge area to testify about what he was told during private confessions. The court’s ruling has revived a lawsuit that was filed by parents of a teen who says she told a priest about being fondled by a male parishioner.
The woman, now an adult, said she told the priest on three separate occasions in the confessional booth about the molestation. The Catholic Church tried, unsuccessfully, to block the woman from testifying about her confidential confessions. But the state Supreme Court said if she waived her right to keep her confessions private, the priest “cannot then raise it to protect himself.”
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