Is it up to the Supreme Court to save religious liberty? | Erasmus More | CWR's The Dispatch
Such is the state of American society and of religious liberty in American society that the US government is not not embarrassed to persecute the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Following the death of Justice Scalia, will the Supreme Court reverse what has been its recent record of protecting religious liberty? After its two gay-marriage decisions in the last three years, with their deepening implications for religious freedom, many Americans of faith may not sufficiently appreciate that in the last five years, the Supreme Court has issued two decisions, one unanimous, that have turned back the Obama administration’s attempts to undercut the ability of religious people to live according to their convictions. Now, however, with the Court having set March 23rd as the date to hear oral arguments in the case of the Obama administration versus the Little Sisters of the Poor, everything could change.
In the Hosanna Tabor case (2012), a Lutheran elementary church and its school fired a teacher of religion and other classes because she had narcolepsy. The teacher had been on disability leave and had wanted to return to teaching, but the school decided that she was not ready to return. Invoking the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Obama administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued. The school defended itself by arguing that the teacher was one of its trained and designated “ministers,” and, therefore, its decision to terminate the teacher was protected under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court unanimously held for the school. The decision is the first time in our history that our highest court has ever recognized a “ministerial exception” in employment law. That exception had been the basis of rulings in lower federal court for decades. It took the Obama administration to attempt to extinguish it by overturning those rulings and law. The argument of the Obama administration was that the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not even apply! Instead, it argued that the case should have been addressed under freedom of association, a derivative right not mentioned in the text of the First Amendment but recognized by the Supreme Court. Writing for the unanimous Court, Justice Roberts rebuked the Obama administration for its “extreme position” and for “the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.”
For a religious issue of comparable gravity, one would almost have to go back to American colonial times when some colonies prohibited Catholic priests altogether. If the federal government can prescribe who is and who is not a minister, it is difficult to imagine what the free exercise of religion might mean in this country. For, religion does not exist aside from its ministers. “How are they to hear without a preacher?” (Rom 10:14).
The issues and the arguments in the Hobby Lobby case (2014) were more complicated, but the decision of the Supreme Court upheld religious liberty again. Under Obamacare, the Obama administration had sought to force the arts and crafts store, Hobby Lobby, owned by Evangelical Christians, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a woodworking business owned by Mennonites, to provide contraceptive services to its employees. Both businesses, facing enormous and daily fines from the federal government, objected that such coercion violated their religious beliefs because certain contraceptives are abortifacients.
The Obama administration invoked federal jurisdiction pursuant to its own executive “mandate” issued by the Department of HHS pursuant to Obamacare that required all health plans nationwide to include contraceptive services.
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