In April 1987 the congregation leased a parcel in Hialeah, Florida, and said publicly what it intended to build: a house of worship, a school, a cultural centre and a museum. Within weeks the city council met in emergency session and began passing ordinances. The final set made it an offence to kill an animal in a public or private ritual, whatever was done with the carcass afterwards.
What the ordinances did not touch is the part the Supreme Court found decisive. Kosher slaughter was exempt. So was commercial slaughter, hunting, fishing, pest extermination, the euthanising of stray animals, and the feeding of live rabbits to racing greyhounds. A city genuinely worried about animals dying, or about waste in the street, would have written rules that caught all of those. These rules caught one.
Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, was decided on 11 June 1993. Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court, and the judgment to reverse was unanimous, although the reasoning split several ways in concurrence. A law that is neither neutral nor generally applicable must survive the strictest scrutiny, and these ordinances did not: their stated interests in public health and animal welfare could have been served by rules far short of a flat prohibition on one religion's central rite.
The case is now cited far beyond this congregation, in litigation that has nothing to do with the orishas. It began because a small Lucumi church in Florida said out loud what it was going to do.