This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
After a Santeria congregation, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, announced plans to open in Hialeah, Florida, the city council passed ordinances in September 1987 banning ritual animal sacrifice while carving out exemptions for kosher slaughter, ordinary slaughterhouses, hunting and pest control. The congregation read the exemptions as proof the ban targeted its religion specifically, and sued.
The case reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously on June 11, 1993, six years after Hialeah passed the ordinances. The Court held that the ordinances violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment precisely because they singled out religious conduct rather than applying a neutral rule of general application.
The exemptions written into the ordinances were what sank them: a law that exempted every comparable killing of animals except the religious one could not credibly claim to be about anything other than the religion itself.
What the ruling changed for Santeria's standing in the United States was parity with every other religion practiced there. A tradition that had been legislated against by name, however indirectly, won the same constitutional protection for its central practices that other faiths already took for granted, closing off a legal strategy other municipalities might otherwise have copied.