Dallas News - A court case forced a Santeria priest to reveal some of his religion’s secrets. Its ritual of animal sacrifice, he revealed on his own.

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Within days of the deadline, Laycock found Eric Rassbach, the national litigation director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C. Legal Liberty's director Hiram Sasser also helped Rassbach prepare for his oral arguments, stressing the importance of making the judges comfortable with animal sacrifice in the context of religious freedom. "That's always the hardest part about handling a case that involves weird facts," Sasser says. "Everybody has to understand that their religious freedom is tied together."

Rassbach hit that point hard during his arguments before a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit, which on July 31 ruled in favor of Merced and ordered the lower court to issue an injunction against the city of Euless. The panel didn't decide the case on First Amendment grounds but rather on its interpretation of the TRFRA.

In an August 7 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "Why I Defend Goat Sacrifice," Rassbach praised the appellate court for championing religious freedom.

"The Court did not decide whether Mr. Merced's beliefs were right or wrong, orthodox or unorthodox," Rassbach wrote. "It simply held that as long as he is not endangering public health or safety, the government had to leave those beliefs up to him and his gods."

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