Know Your Rights: Religious Freedom

The American Civil Liberties Union strives to safeguard the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty by ensuring that laws and governmental practices neither promote religion nor interfere with its free exercise. Learn more from Attorney Labinger about your right to express your religion and beliefs and be protected from discrimination in various situations like the workplace, housing, public schools, businesses, prisons, and discrimination against your house of worship. Learn about landmark cases Lynette and the Rhode Island ACLU have successfully fought for and won for religious freedom. There will be an audience Q&A session for general questions that can benefit our Rhode Island Pagan community.

Attorney Lynette Labinger is an outstanding Rhode Island constitutional and civil rights attorney who has made a successful career out of fighting for social change. She has been celebrated as “one of the region’s most successful and dedicated social advocacy lawyers, playing a significant role in cases and court decisions that have affected everything from equality in women’s athletics to the rights of prison preachers, avant-garde artists and same-sex couples.”

Having earned her J.D. at New York University School of Law, Labinger came to Rhode Island to work with with the Honorable Raymond J. Pettine of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, known for his groundbreaking decisions in the field of constitutional and civil rights. She later joined a law firm headed by Milton Stanzler, one of the founders of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Labinger continued to champion constitutional and civil rights litigation throughout her years of private practice. Since 2018, she has limited her practice to cases sponsored by the ACLU of Rhode Island. A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, Lynette has received numerous honors for her civil rights advocacy. She headed the team that successfully represented Horn and Cauldron, Church of the Earth, a Rhode Island-based Wiccan teaching coven, when their local government denied them a zoning permit, violating U.S. Constitutional rights guaranteed by the 1st and 14th Amendments as well as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.