Mr. Colmer, like Nixon, objected to the law's applicability only to seven Southern states -- the same reason Mr. Lott gave years later for voting against a similar extension of the act.
The gambling group said: Betfair has been working with the relevant tax authorities to seek clarification on interpretation of the law and its applicability to exchanges.
Mr. Wolfson, arguing for Mr. Dale, said the Boy Scouts, "one of the least private public accommodations in the country," had not justified an exclusion from a "neutral civil rights law of general applicability".
Neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court precedents give religiously affiliated institutions the right to be exempted from a neutral law of general applicability.
But William Marshall, a First Amendment scholar at the University of North Carolina Law School, said the Supreme Court asserted in a 1990 opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia that religious groups had a big burden in overcoming "a valid and neutral law of general applicability".
Even a sincere religious motivation, in the absence of some special circumstance like proof of government animus, does not merit exemption from a "valid and neutral law of general applicability," the court held.
However, it confirmed the notion of the rule of law and the applicability of trial by jury, which had seen its origins during Henry II's rule in the previous century when the first judges emerged too.
"[T]he right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability," Scalia wrote in the 6-3 majority decision, going on to aggressively argue that such exemptions could be a slippery slope to lawlessness and that "[a]ny society adopting such a system would be courting anarchy".
The court found that Oregon could deny the benefits — even though the workers said their use of peyote was part of a religious ritual — under the general principle that Oregon's ban on peyote was a "valid and neutral law of general applicability".
