It’s the sort of situation for which a Trinidadian feels an immediate sympathy, especially those among us with a passion for wildmeat.

A case is now pending before a federal court in Brooklyn, in which Mamie Manneh, an immigrant from West Africa and a resident of Staten Island, stands accused of having brought smoked bushmeat (wild African game) into the US without the proper permits, in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (which as a ratified treaty is also US law).

In January 2006, Manneh was stopped by custom agents at JFK, who searched some luggage marked “12 ctn (cotton) African dresses and smoked fish.” Mixed in with those items the agents discovered 65 pieces of animal parts, including the hoof and leg of a small antelope.

The heart of Manneh’s defence is that eating bushmeat has cultural and spiritual significance. Seventeen of her co-religionists stated in an affidavit: “We eat bushmeat for our souls.”

Her lawyer analogised the practice to the consumption of foods like bitter herbs at the Jewish seder, and moved a motion to dismiss. The case, he concluded, “represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the melting pot that is America.”

Would that it were so simple. The clash, others opined, represented something more fundamental for Americans, ie a clash between the imperatives of religion and the rule of law.

The question was whether elements of religious belief were sufficient to exempt believers from the application of laws that applied to everyone else, irrespective of religious or moral convictions. Was religious practice a special case that gave believers a pass?

In the 18th century, the issue was explored by John Locke, one of the fathers of the modern liberal state, in his famous piece, A Letter Concerning Toleration.

Is it lawful, Locke asked, for Meliboeus (a fictitious name) to slaughter a calf and offer it as a sacrifice at a religious meeting? It depends, he says, on whether slaughtering a calf in order to put food on his family’s table is lawful. If it is, then killing a calf for ritual purposes is perfectly allowable, for “what may be spent on a feast may be spent on a sacrifice.”

Locke moved then in the other direction. Suppose, he says, a disease had destroyed a large number of cattle and the government decreed that no more could be slaughtered. The prohibition would surely extend to religious rituals, not as a deliberate target of state action, but as a practice swept up in the wake of a general law.

It would follow that some people would no longer be able to engage in behaviour they considered central to their belief, but because that was not the aim of the directive—the good of the commonwealth was—the government could not be accused of aiming to harm religion, even if harm were an unintended consequence of its action.

Religious people could not be exempted from the general prohibition, because that would amount to bending the law to the special preferences of particular citizens. Once begun, there was no pulling back from that direction, no logical place to stop. It would mean the end of the rule of law.

In the 20th century, in situations analogous to Manneh’s, including the ingestion of peyote in Native American religious ritual, and the Mormon practice of polygamy, the US Supreme Court has consistently ruled along Lockean lines.

In the Mormon case, the court looked at the argument advanced by a man convicted of practising polygamy, who claimed that it was the religious duty of male members of the Mormon Church to engage in plural marriage. The penalty for failing to do so was “damnation in the life to come.”

The court replied that the prohibition against polygamy was general, not directed at any sect, and asked rhetorically, “Can a man excuse his illegal practice of an interdicted behaviour just because of his religious belief?”

The rationale in the “peyote” case was similar. Peyote, also called the “divine” or “sacramental” cactus, is historically common to Native American ritual, but is a “controlled substance,” according to the laws of Oregon.

Native American celebrants contended that their use of peyote placed them beyond the reach of the criminal law, which was not specifically directed at their religious practice. In other words, Oregonians could not ingest peyote as a recreational drug, but it was perfectly permissible for believers, whose use was sacramental.

No such luck, said Justice Antonin Scalia. The intention of the law was not to curtail anyone’s exercise of religion, but the fact that the free exercise rights of some people happened to be impacted negatively was just “the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid principle.”

If that left believers unhappy, they could seek redress through the political process, and try to get laws passed that addressed their concerns.

The subsequent legal history of the issue has taken a few twists and turns, but the upshot of the development is as follows. The aggrieved parties in Oregon prevailed when Congress passed a law making the use of peyote in religious ceremonies an exception to the controlled substance regulations.

Congress also subsequently passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which shifted the burden to the government to prove a “compelling government interest” in imposing a “substantial” burden upon believers (the threat of ebola in Manneh’s case is what prosecutors plan to pursue).

The RFRA was greeted by supporters as a triumph for religious freedom and by opponents as licence for law-breakers.

What have the repercussions been for Manneh and her co-religionsits? Well, for the time being, importation of bushmeat has reportedly slowed, to the great discomfort of many. One immigrant noted how a small amount of bushmeat can change the character of a stew, adding a spiciness that is hard to describe.

On another level, in another recent case, the court called into question Congress’ ability to pass the RFRA Act. It was the province of Congress to make law, said Justice Anthony Kennedy, “not alter constitutional meaning.”

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, however, dissented. “Our nation’s founders,” she noted, “conceived of a republic receptive to voluntary religious expression, not a secular society in which religious expression is tolerated only when it does not conflict with generally applicable law.”

Which means, of course, that the matter has not been put to rest, and lives to be fought over anew in another day.