WASHINGTON – A Supreme Court that has been increasingly protective of religious rights is expected to be sympathetic to a Rastafarian asking for help after Louisiana prison guards forcibly shaved his dreadlocks.
But if the justices are not attuned to the spiritual significance of the lengthy locks when they take up Damon Landor’s appeal on Nov. 10, perhaps religious scholars will have convinced the court of their significance.
Seven of the Supreme Court justices were raised Catholic. Because dreadlocks are a connection to the living essence of the universe, cutting them off is like keeping a Catholic from receiving the Eucharist, five experts on the religion wrote in a filing supporting Landor.
“To be irrevocably deprived of such an important symbolic and physical connection to God against one’s will,” they wrote, “is a brutal and dehumanizing intrusion into a Rastafari’s religious liberty that demands an avenue for recompense.”
The court will debate on Nov. 10 whether Landor can seek damages from the prison officials who cut off the knee-length locks he’d been growing for nearly a decade.
