c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ As a University of Pennsylvania veterinary student, Gloria Binkowski risked expulsion over her opposition to the school custom of breaking the legs of animals to provide budding vets with practice fractures.

Now, Binkowski’s strongly held beliefs concerning animal rights have taken her a step higher _ she’s challenging the state of New Jersey and its law to protect hunters from harassment.

In an innovative challenge to the law, lawyers at the Rutgers University Animal Rights Law Clinic have filed a suit on her behalf claiming the state is infringing on Binkowski’s right to exercise her religion.

Anna Charlton, a lawyer at the Rutgers clinic, said her client’s spiritual beliefs compel her to try to persuade hunters not to kill.

“Dr. Binkowski has this strong spiritual belief that requires her not to harm animals, and that gives her a certain view on hunting issues,” Charlton said. “The hunter harassment law impermissibly prevents her from discussing that view with hunters. It stops the debate for her.”

State lawyers take a decidedly different position.

“There is nothing about this law that forces her to violate any of her religious beliefs,” said Chuck Davis, a spokesman for Attorney General Peter Verniero. “She doesn’t have to hunt.”

And critics who characterize hunt protesters as a fringe element worry about the pending lawsuit’s broader implications.

Armed with a successful decision, they wonder, could fundamentalists visit the services of other religions to try to win converts?

“Can I go to a secular meeting and disrupt it on religious grounds?” wonders the Rev. Theodore Vitali, an expert on hunting ethics and a professor at St. Louis University.

J.R. Absher, a spokesman for the Wildlife Legislative Fund of America, which represents 1.5 million sports enthusiasts, said his group monitors such lawsuits and this is the first time he’s ever seen the religious exercise argument used.

Hunter harassment laws, which became so popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s that every state enacted one, are designed to prevent protesters from interfering with legal hunting. New Jersey passed its own statute in 1993.

Greg Huljack, chief enforcement officer for New Jersey’s Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife, said four hunting protests have led to arrests since the law’s passage. In one case, protesters sprayed human urine in an area slated for hunting to scare away prey.”Protesters have exercised their rights for a long time on many occasions,” Huljack said.”That’s not what this prohibits. It prohibits interfering with someone’s right to hunt or fish.” Binkowski, who declined an in-depth interview on advice of her lawyer, has not been arrested for violating the statute, which carries a maximum fine of $500. The veterinarian said she wants to protest hunting and the law would appear to prevent that.

Binkowski said her opposition to hunting and the religious grounds for contesting the statute are based on a philosophy that reveres all life, encroaching on other living things as little as possible.

“I think it’s a rational philosophy,” she said. “It’s kind, and I believe in it. I think hunting is a form of cruelty. People don’t need to kill for sport or recreation. People don’t even need to eat meat.”

Hunting advocates are concerned, however, by the implications of a decision overturning the law on religious grounds. They argue that religious practitioners can’t be allowed to harass other citizens, just as free speech protections don’t allow citizens to run into a crowded theater and yell, “Fire.”

“No one is saying she can’t speak out but she can’t interfere with the lawful actions of these hunters,” Vitali said. “She wants to get in your face.”

Past efforts to overturn hunter harassment statutes on free-speech grounds have failed, most recently in a decision last year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Protesters have won some minor victories, forcing legislators to clarify statute language, but the basic premise that government has an interest in protecting wildlife through controlled hunting has been upheld.

Charlton said the Rutgers clinic used the religious argument on Binkowski’s behalf in 1987 when it represented her in the case against the University of Pennsylvania. Before the case was decided, the school reached an agreement with Binkowski, allowing her to practice setting fractures with a community veterinarian.

Because hunting is an activity that often requires silence and stealth, protesters shouting loud noises or even trying to talk to hunters are looked at by sportsmen as a nuisance.

The law bars protesters from making loud noises or gestures, setting out bait or any other action that would “disturb, alarm, drive, attack or affect the behavior of wildlife or disturb, alarm, disrupt or annoy a person lawfully taking wildlife.”

“I would love to have a statute that says `Thou shalt not annoy me,’ ” Charlton said. “But we have to live with dissenting views. This silences dissent.”

MJP END RNS