The couple filed a religious discrimination claim under the Fair Housing Act, against both the Homeowners Association and the Association President. They claimed the defendants' conduct constituted (1) discriminatory terms, conditions, facilities and services in the sale or rental of housing, and (2) religiously-motivated harassment, both of which are squarely prohibited by the Fair Housing Act.

The defendants moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the Fair Housing Act only prohibits discrimination when it prevents people from acquiring housing. Because the Halprins owned their home, they were no longer covered by the substantive portions of the statute. The Seventh Circuit agreed and dismissed the discrimination claim. (The opinion contains dicta stating the court's belief that the harassment claim should be dismissed as well, but that the defense failed to properly argue this point and so waived its argument.)

Note that the Halprins allegations were taken as true because the issue came to the Court on the defendants' motion for summary judgment. So the case was not dismissed because the plaintiffs had alleged discriminatory conduct, or because the Court didn't believe the plaintiffs' story. The case was thrown out because the court decided the Fair Housing Act doesn't apply to discriminatory conduct if it occurs after the acquisition of housing.

The Court based this dramatic leap in logic on it's conclusion that when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968 it was concerned only with ending segregation:

"Behind the Act lay the widespread practice of refusing to sell or rent homes in desirable residential areas to members of minority groups. Since the focus was on their exclusion, the problem of how they were treated when they were included, that is, when they were allowed to own or rent homes in such areas, was not at the forefront of congressional thinking. That problem--the problem not of exclusion but of expulsion--would become acute only when the law forced unwanted associations that might provoke efforts at harassment, and so it would tend not to arise until the Act was enacted and enforced.

(I don't have space here to adequately address the implication raised by the last sentence of this excerpt - that it is the law's forcing of "unwanted associations" that provokes harassment. As if harassment is the fault of civil rights laws, and minority group members who seek to exercise their civil rights, rather than the racism, anti-Semitism, and violent bigotry of those who carry out the harassment... )

On one point, the Court is correct: the floor debates and committee hearings that make up the legislative history of the Fair Housing Act (due to the way law was passed, there are no formal committee reports) indicate that Congress was primarily concerned with ending segregation. But remedial civil rights statutes are intended to be given a broad construction, precisely because discriminators can always figure out new and ingenious ways to discriminate.

Moreover, the Congress that passed the Fair Housing Act was concerned with housing discrimination as an affront to human dignity. The bill's supporters were anguished by the ills that housing discrimination had created - the urban ghettos, the disenfranchisement and rage of their inhabitants, the creation of "Two Americas - one white and one black." They were also terrified of the riots that were erupting in cities across America. Their goal was a world in which people of different races could live peacefully together, side by side. It is hard to imagine that goal being realized if blacks, once able to live in the same communities or apartment buildings as whites, could be freely harassed, discriminated against, and threatened with expulsion. It is also hard to imagine a better recipe for further violence.

One could argue that Halprin and its progeny embody the trend of our post-Civil Rights age - the notion that equality of opportunity and access is all that matters. Now that we are all equal in the eyes of the law, the playing field is hereby leveled. Not only do law and policy-makers downplay the degree to which structural and institutional discrimination still bars access to social goods like jobs, education, or housing, they also fail to appreciate the extent to which discrimination and harassment can alter these social goods for a member of a protected class who is able to obtain them.

Or perhaps Halprin was just the product of a careless law clerk working for a circuit that has been applying an increasingly narrow view of the Fair Housing Act in recent years (See, Landlords: It's Legal to Sexually Harass Your Tenants and Follow Up To: It's Legal to Sexually Harass Your Tenants). For all the sweeping doctrinal changes it suggests, the opinion itself is only a few pages long and contains very little citation. Nevertheless, the opinion is now good law, and increasing numbers of courts have followed it. In cases all over the country, housing discrimination cases are being dismissed before their merits can be heard because, apparently, housing rights end after the moving truck leaves.