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‘Significant Threat’: Federal Government Launches Plan to Track ‘Faith’ Data

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In a day when the federal government sends grandmothers to jail for advocating for the lives of the unborn, insists it can coerce Christian companies to pay for abortion and promote an LGBT ideology that is out of mainstream, and more, a federal bureaucracy’s blast against religious freedom shouldn’t, perhaps, be a surprise.

It is the U.S. Department of Energy that has begun tracking employees’ beliefs through a plan to monitor employment accommodations.

And Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., is objecting.

He wrote Ann Dunkin, a DOE official, to “express my strong opposition to the Department of Energy’s recent notice regarding the establishment of a new system of records … .”

He warned the agenda “represents a grave violation of religious liberty as protected under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

It is the Washington Stand that obtained a copy of the letter Lankford delivered to the DOE. (Read more from “‘Significant Threat’: Federal Government Launches Plan to Track ‘Faith’ Data” HERE)

Judge Orders 3 Southwest Lawyers Take Religious Liberty Training After Trampling on First Amendment

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A federal judge ordered three Southwest Airlines lawyers to undergo “religious-liberty training” after it fired an attendant who had anti-abortion beliefs, according to reports.

U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr said the lawyers who defied court orders should brush up on their First Amendment knowledge at the Christian group “Alliance Defending Freedom,” ruling the organization “is particularly well-suited” to teach them, according to the New York Post. Starr said the three lawyers did not understand federal protections for religious freedom, Fortune reported.

Charlene Carter sued the airline after she was fired following more than 20 years on the job. Carter posted several social media posts criticizing the union boss who attended a pro-abortion “Women’s March” in 2017.

“You truly are despicable in so many ways,” Carter allegedly wrote in one message, Fortune reported. Carter was fired and subsequently filed a lawsuit in which she was awarded $5.1 million by a Dallas jury which was later lowered to $800,000. (Read more from “Judge Orders 3 Southwest Lawyers Take Religious Liberty Training After Trampling on First Amendment” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

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In Courts Across America, Religious Liberty Is on the Docket in 2023

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Religious liberty will be a hot-button issue in American courts in 2023, with several cases in particular that could set important precedent for the rights of religious Americans in the future, according to lawyers who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Due to Supreme Court cases like Kennedy v. Bremerton High School, regarding education employees’ rights to pray at school, or Carson v. Makin, where the court ruled that public funding could be used for students attending religious schools, religious freedom was often at the center of debate last year. While debates regarding religious freedom and its limits are nothing new, several upcoming legal battles are posed to restructure the debate regarding religious rights at school, in the workplace and in the medical field, the attorneys said.

“If you have a sort of totalitarian regime come in the one thing it can never allow is the citizens to hold an allegiance to one higher than the government,” Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of First Liberty Institute (FLI), told the DCNF. “So whenever that type of oppression comes in it tends to be that the first flashpoint is almost always a religious freedom issue and if you lose there that’s just a beginning of the dominoes that are going to fall.”

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 sparked conflicts with religious medical professionals after many workplaces decided to offer abortion or contraceptive services, often without the possibility of religious exemption, according to First Liberty Institute. Shackelford told DCNF that abortion-related issues were the highest growth area for religious liberty lawsuits. (Read more from “In Courts Across America, Religious Liberty Is on the Docket in 2023” HERE)

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Court Rules Against Bed and Breakfast Owner Who Turned Away Lesbians

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The U.S. Supreme Court handed a defeat on Monday to a bed and breakfast owner in Hawaii who turned away a lesbian couple due to her Christian beliefs, but it could soon take up another major case on the conflict between gay and religious rights.

The justices refused to hear an appeal by Phyllis Young, who runs the three-room Aloha Bed & Breakfast in Honolulu, of a lower court’s ruling that she violated a Hawaii anti-discrimination law by refusing to rent a room to Diane Cervilli and Taeko Bufford in 2007.

A state court ruled that Young ran afoul of Hawaii’s public accommodation law, which among other things bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Litigation will now continue to determine what penalty Young might face.

The Supreme Court’s action came nine months after it sided on very narrow grounds with a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for two men, citing his Christian beliefs. The justices could decide as soon as next week whether to take up a strikingly similar case from Oregon in which a bakery refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple for religious reasons. . .

Young, who is Catholic, said her decision to turn away Cervilli and Bufford was protected by her right to free exercise of religion under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Young also argued that Hawaii did not give her fair notice that her business was covered by the public accommodation law. (Read more from “Court Rules Against Bed and Breakfast Owner Who Turned Away Lesbians” HERE)

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The Supreme Court Has an Opportunity to Protect a WWI Memorial and Make Religious Liberty History

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Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in what may be a watershed case for religion in public life in the United States. At least, that’s what some religious liberty proponents hope will happen.

The question is whether a 40-foot, 93-year-old World War I memorial in the shape of a cross at a busy intersection in Bladensburg, Maryland, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Here’s my explainer from 2017:

So why could the Supreme Court make legal history on this case? Well, as it stands, the body of precedent on the Establishment Clause gives courts, attorneys, and government officials no clear standards to figure out whether or not a “passive display” that has religious imagery violates the First Amendment or not.

Since 1971, courts have inconsistently applied the three-pronged “Lemon test,” which came out of the Lemon v. Kurtzman case. In short, it tests whether the display in question has a secular purpose, doesn’t advance or inhibit religion, and doesn’t foster “excessive entanglement” between church and state. However, in a 2005 Ten Commandments case, a plurality of the SCOTUS justices opted to forgo the Lemon test, calling it “not useful in dealing with the sort of passive monument” in that case and instead focusing on the “nature of the monument” and “our Nation’s history.”

In addressing the Bladensburg monument, the lower courts have used what the solicitor general’s office calls a “hybrid approach” that combines elements of the standards used the two cases mentioned above, further adding to the confusion.

“Because each test’s application is so context-dependent,” the brief asserts, “disputes often cannot be resolved at an early stage; and even seemingly minor differences between displays can produce divergent outcomes.”

“Cases like these cannot help but divide those with sincerely held beliefs on both sides,” the SG’s brief concluded. “This case presents an opportunity for the Court to adopt a standard for Establishment Clause challenges to passive displays that will reduce factious litigation, provide clarity to lower courts, and promote consistency across cases.”

Jeremy Dys, deputy general counsel at Texas-based First Liberty Institute, which is representing the American Legion in the case, explained things to me this way: “We’ve gotten away from the historic understanding of the Establishment Clause.”

Dys says that he would like to see the Supreme Court “abandon the Lemon Test entirely” and adopt what his team is calling a “coercion test,” which would simply test whether or not the government is coercing people to engage in religious beliefs or behavior; if not, the Establishment Clause “is not offended,” he says.

“There’s all kinds of weird little spin-offs of this,” Dys says. “Nobody knows exactly what is going to come out of any given passive display.”

This state of legal confusion comes with real-world consequences, especially for state and local governments. What happens, Dys asks hypothetically, “when there’s a question mark raised about whether or not you’ve got enough reindeer next to the creche on the city square to ensure that it’s secular enough for it to pass constitutional muster?”

“It’s become completely unwieldy for city councilmen and county commissioners and the like to be able to have confidence that they are going to be able to avoid unnecessary and frivolous lawsuits against public displays that may invoke religious imagery or language.”

But while there’s opportunity for clarity if the cross prevails at the high court, a loss could end up endangering some of America’s most solemn national memorials. If the lower court ruling is allowed to stand, Dys explains, “you’re going to find Arlington National Cemetery under threat.”

The hallowed cemetery for our nation’s heroes is on public land and full of memorial crosses similar to the one in suburban Maryland, such as the Argonne Cross and the Canadian Cross of Sacrifice.

Dys also notes that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier bears the words “known but to God” as part of its inscription. “Is that gonna have to be sandblasted off the side the Tomb of the Unknowns?” He asks. “I’d like to see them try.”

Dys and the solicitor general’s office are not alone in their assessments. Justice Clarence Thomas has repeatedly noted how confusing this area of First Amendment law has become, and he started making that point decades ago.

In his concurring opinion in the 1995 Rosenberger v. Rector decision, Thomas wrote that “our Establishment Clause jurisprudence is in hopeless disarray.” When dissenting against the court’s refusal to hear a case out of Utah in 2011, Thomas also noted that “this Court’s nebulous Establishment Clause analyses” have “confounded the lower courts and rendered the constitutionality of displays of religious imagery on government property anyone’s guess.”

In a 1993 opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia compared the Lemon test to “some ghoul in a late night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad.” (For more from the author of “The Supreme Court Has an Opportunity to Protect a WWI Memorial and Make Religious Liberty History” please click HERE)

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Air Force Colonel Who Refused to ‘Appreciate’ Gay Man’s Spouse Wins Appeal

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Decorated Air Force combat pilot Col. Leland Bohannon, who was stripped of his command and denied promotion opportunity for refusing to sign a certificate of appreciation for a retiree’s gay spouse, has won an appeal affirming religious liberty.

Bohannon did not sign the “optional, unofficial” spouse appreciation letter because he has a deeply-held religious objection to gay marriage and did not want to appear to endorse an immoral union – so, he had a superior, a two-star general, sign it.

But, that wasn’t good enough for the indignant gay retiree, who filed a complaint against Bohannon, “Stars and Stripes” reports:

“When the retiring master sergeant found out that Bohannon did not personally sign the spouse certificate, he filed an Equal Opportunity complaint, alleging the colonel unlawfully discriminated against him on the basis of his sexual orientation.”

….

“The Air Force substantiated the airman’s allegations, and Bohannon was subsequently removed from command and for consideration for promotion. He appealed the decision in October.”

(Read more from “Air Force Colonel Who Refused to ‘Appreciate’ Gay Man’s Spouse Wins Appeal” HERE)

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Judges Are Destroying Our Republic

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Each new day brings another court ruling more absurd and damaging to our republic than the previous one. And each new ruling is met with stunning silence from the other two branches of government. This time, courts are preparing a new constitutional right to access someone else’s Twitter account, even as they violate the inviolable provisions of the First Amendment – to abide by one’s conscience with one’s own private property.

When I saw the CNBC article on Thursday titled, “A federal judge is skeptical about whether Trump can block Twitter users,” I thought it was an early April Fools’ parody. But then I remembered that U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald had actually granted standing to a random plaintiff to sue Trump for blocking him on Twitter. Because we now live in a time when judges can place any political question – even a teenager catfight on social media – into court as a justiciable case, and the other branches of government will regard their judicial malpractice as “the law of the land.”

For years we had an epidemic of frivolous lawsuits between two parties under civil law. They were disruptive to our economy. But now we have frivolous constitutional lawsuits that are literally destroying our republic – erasing the most unambiguous rights of the Constitution while creating new imaginary rights that infringe upon the real rights, all the while elevating the role of the district judge to that of a king and even God.

On Thursday, during oral arguments in the Twitter catfight case, judicial goddess Buchwald reportedly told Trump’s lawyer, “Once it [Twitter] is a public forum, you can’t shut somebody up because you don’t like what they’re saying.”

By the way, Buchwald is the same person who accused Sarah Palin of using her son with Down syndrome, Trig, as a prop during the 2008 election. I guess she doesn’t want anyone blocking her insensitivity from their timelines on Twitter.

This is an exceedingly dangerous territory the judicial statists have just entered. They are now saying that merely blocking someone from following you on Twitter is tantamount to physically shutting them up from talking and is a violation of the First Amendment.

Think about this for a moment: The federal courts are almost unanimously saying that you must violate your conscience and serve gay weddings with your private property. You are not allowed to merely mind your own business; you will be forced to take action for someone else, according to the corrupt legal profession. And now these same people think that you have the right to someone else’s Twitter account.

Isn’t it also interesting that the Left has no problem with the Twitter corporation itself banning conservatives as “haters” (while they allow ISIS accounts), but private users cannot block other people from seeing their tweets?

Folks, this is really simple. Private property is private property. All of the following is true:

Twitter, as a private company, has the right to grant an account to anyone it chooses. I have a right to talk and write about anything I want without the government locking me up, but I don’t have a right to someone else’s forum. Yes, Twitter can ban me or anyone else.

Your private Twitter account granted to you by the organization is yours (until suspended), and nobody has a constitutional right to see your tweets.

I have the right to run my private business in accordance with my conscience, and you have no right to obtain employment or services from me.

In all of these cases, people are free to make political arguments against the policies and views of individuals and companies. We have the right to real free speech, using any platform we can find, to show Twitter’s hypocrisy as a matter of policy. Others have the right to make fun of Trump for blocking them. Still others have the right to weigh in on the prudence or “morality” of a private entity denying a service. But nobody has a constitutional right to be entitled, as a legal matter, to someone else’s property.

In the past, it took about 15-30 years for liberals to transform their political positions into legal imperatives. Now we have reached a crisis in the legal profession where essentially every Democrat political belief is now instantly enshrined as a constitutional right or mandate.

For example, last week, a unanimous ruling from the Sixth Circuit, which is not even the most liberal panel, wrote transgenderism into civil rights employment discrimination law. The Sixth joined the Seventh and Second Circuits in doing so. No matter how strongly liberals might desire this political outcome, there is no way one can posit that transgenderism is included in the 1964 law. You can’t rewrite the law from the bench. But every single Democrat appointee and even a few GOP judges have done so because they conflate their political desires with legal and constitutional mandates.

Not only are judges warping the Constitution in service of an ideology against the Constitution’s most sacred precepts, they are simultaneously elevating their power to do so.

Judicial review doesn’t mean that courts get to decide on the constitutionality of every law and political act, even when they are properly interpreting the Constitution. They can only grant relief to an individual plaintiff who has a meaningful and tangible injury from the said policy or from the act of another private citizen. Not being able to directly access someone’s Twitter account is not an injury our Founders had in mind when they vested the Supreme Court with the judicial power.

Inane rules of standing have now allowed any political movement to argue their policy preferences in court and have the judge rule on abstract policies while applying them nationwide. Just last week, Judge William Alsup, the same judge who said it’s illegal not to violate immigration law, gave standing to random kids to sue the government over global warming without an individualized, tangible, and proven grievance. What’s next? A debate about UFOs in district court?

So far, Congress obsequiously toes the line of every utterance from one of these rogue judges. To his credit, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is directly challenging the notion that a district judge has such power, but the administration is still refusing to take it to the next level.

What’s next?

It’s time for Trump to demand that Congress pass Rep. Dave Brat’s judicial reform bill, which explicitly denies lower courts the power to issue nationwide injunctions on political issues.

If not, we are about to be treated to the spectacle of the president of the United States as a lame duck who won’t even control his own Twitter account. (For more from the author of “Judges Are Destroying Our Republic” please click HERE)

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Trump’s Justice Department Still Defending Obama Contraception Mandate

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Advocates for religious liberty are dismayed that little has changed with respect to the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, even after President Donald Trump signed a religious freedom executive order earlier this year.

“I believe the president is committed to religious freedom and that Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions is a good man. But their goals simply haven’t played out,” Douglas Wilson, CEO of the Catholic Benefits Association, told The Daily Signal.

The Supreme Court punted on the Little Sisters of the Poor’s religious liberty case against the Obama Department of Health and Human Services, though broadly gave the Catholic charity a victory in vacating lower court rulings and asking that parties submit proposals to settle the situation.

After the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration imposed a mandate that employers pay for insurance plans that cover contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs.

The Catholic Benefits Association, which was begun in 2013 and represents 1,000 Catholic employers, won a preliminary injunction lawsuit against the Obama administration rule in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

The Justice Department appealed that ruling and has refused to drop the appeal. As recently as July 31, it filed a motion to keep the appeal moving forward. The motion referred to unspecified regulatory resolution that the administration was trying to reach.

However, the Department of Health and Human Services had already presented a draft regulation to the White House Office of Management and Budget in May that concluded the Obama-era contraception mandate was illegal and not necessary to protect women’s health, Wilson noted in a letter to Trump. The draft regulation has never been implemented.

“It’s an Obamacare rule, but this particular regulation came out of the HHS and could be overturned by the administration,” Wilson said.

In an Aug. 16 letter to Trump, Wilson wrote:

Had Congress repealed and replaced Obamacare, I would not be writing you today. However, I write to draw your attention to a particularly unpopular and onerous part of Obamacare that is directly within your control to fix, and that you have previously pledged to fix: the imposition of Obamacare’s contraception, sterilization and abortifacient (abortion-causing drugs) mandate upon the faith community. …

HHS, OMB, and DOJ could end this six-year nightmare almost immediately by:

1. Stopping the defense of Obamacare Mandates in court.

2. Agreeing to a permanent injunction protecting plaintiffs in all such cases.

3. Publishing, unchanged, the excellent proposed HHS regulation.

“The department is committed to robust enforcement of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but we will not comment on ongoing settlement discussions,” Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior told The Daily Signal.

In signing an executive order in May, Trump invited the Little Sisters of the Poor to the podium during a Rose Garden ceremony, and said, “Congratulations, you sort of just won a lawsuit.”

There’s an apparent disconnect between what Trump and Sessions are talking about and the actions of the Justice Department, said Montse Alvarado, executive director of the Becket Fund, a legal group that litigates for religious liberty that is representing the Little Sisters of the Poor.

“The Justice Department is not doing what the president promised the Little Sisters of the Poor in the Rose Garden,” Alvarado told The Daily Signal. “DOJ negotiations have been going on for three months. Seven months into this administration, we expected something different [from the Trump administration] than what we got from the Obama administration.”

Asked about the issue last week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she was not aware of the complaints and referred a reporter to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“To ensure fairness, the Administrative Procedure Act limits the ability of government officials from disclosing any non-public information regarding rulemaking and regulations,” HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd told The Daily Signal in an email.

The Obama administration initially carved out a very narrow exemption for religious institutions. But other religious employers, among them hospitals, schools, and charities, as well as businesses, were still responsible for complying with the Obamacare mandate. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case provided protection to privately held businesses, but many private employers were still subject to the mandate.

During the Rose Garden event in May, Trump said the “long ordeal” of religious employers was coming to an end, and it hasn’t, said Melanie Israel, research associate for the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.

“The mandate is a burden on employers, individuals, and religious organizations who, because of their beliefs concerning the protection of unborn human life, are faced with the decision to violate sincerely held religious or moral beliefs, pay steep fines, or forgo offering or obtaining health insurance entirely,” Israel told The Daily Signal in an email.

“It is time for the Trump administration to make good on the promise made four months ago and ensure that these groups’ ‘long ordeal’ with the contraception mandate comes to an end,” she added. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Justice Department Still Defending Obama Contraception Mandate” please click HERE)

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Gorsuch and Thomas Team up Again in Religious Liberty Win

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Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have teamed up again, this time in a major religious liberty case involving a church, some monkey bars, some tire scraps, and a legal relic of 19th-century legal persecution.

On the last day of this session, the court ruled in favor of the petitioner in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer – saying that denying funds for a church playground based on religion is a violation of the First Amendment right to free exercise.

The case started in January 2013 after the state of Missouri denied a preschool access to a statewide public safety program that provides recycled tires for playgrounds simply because the preschool was operated by a church. The preschool wanted to remove the pea gravel surfacing encompassing the recreational space and replace it with safer tire scraps.

In a 7-2 ruling authored by Chief Justice Roberts – in which Justice Kagan joined from the bench’s liberal wing – the court ruled that “The Free Exercise Clause ‘protect[s] religious observers against unequal treatment’ and subjects to the strictest scrutiny laws that target the religious for ‘special disabilities’ based on their ‘religious status,’” citing a 1993 religious liberty ruling.

“Applying that basic principle,” it continues, “this Court has repeatedly confirmed that denying a generally available benefit solely on account of religious identity imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion that can be justified only by a state interest ‘of the highest order.’”

Missouri is one of the majority of U.S. states that have what’s known as a Blaine Amendment. These are legal leftovers from the 19th century that were dreamed up during a fervor of anti-Catholic animus in American history.

Back then, the intent was to make sure that Catholic schools did not receive funding on par with heavily Protestant public schools; now, in the majority of U.S. states where these laws exist, critics say that the provisions serve as a stumbling block to school choice programs and – in this case – playground safety programs.

The court found that the state of Missouri had discriminated against the church based on its status as a religious institution, since the playground was to be used by kids and families of all faiths and traditions.

“[T]he exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church,” the court concludes, “is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.”

However, Gorsuch and Thomas took issue with a footnote that left open the possibility of future discrimination against churches similarly, if it were determined that the funds would go to a religious use.

The pair of originalists joined the majority partially, but made clear their reservations about that particular distinction.

“[T]he Court leaves open the possibility a useful distinction might be drawn between laws that discriminate on the basis of religious status and religious use,” reads a concurring opinion from Thomas. “Respectfully, I harbor doubts about the stability of such a line.”

“The distinction blurs in much the same way the line between acts and omissions can blur when stared at too long,” he continues, “leaving us to ask (for example) whether the man who drowns by awaiting the incoming tide does so by act (coming upon the sea) or omission (allowing the sea to come upon him).”

Conservative legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Trinity Lutheran in the case, is nonetheless pleased with the outcome. With today’s victory, the ADF takes home its fifth Supreme Court win in seven years.

“The government should treat children’s safety at religious schools the same as it does at nonreligious schools,” reads a statement by ADF senior counsel David Courtman. “The Supreme Court’s decision today affirms that commonsense principle and the larger truth that government isn’t being neutral when it treats religious organizations worse than everyone else.” (For more from the author of “Gorsuch and Thomas Team up Again in Religious Liberty Win” please click HERE)

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Religious Liberty Wins Big at the Supreme Court

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A big win today for religious liberty from the Supreme Court. In a sweeping 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment. The case was Trinity Lutheran v. Comer.

Missouri offered recycled tires to schools for safer playgrounds. Missouri said that Trinity Lutheran School couldn’t even have used tires. Why? Because it is run by a church.

Keeping kids safe doesn’t spread the Gospel. There is no “compelling state interest” in leaving religious school playgrounds more dangerous than public ones.

Chief Justice John Roberts knew what to think about banning an ordinary public benefit like safety equipment from a school just because it’s Christian. He called it “odious to our Constitution.”

Here’s a second piece of (maybe) good news. The Court today decided to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Colorado fined baker Jack Phillips for refusing to decorate a gay wedding cake.

Mississippi’s Religious Freedom Act

A third piece of good news from the lower courts: Last week a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals panel lifted an injunction. It had blocked Mississippi’s “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.”

Mississippi’s 2016 law is the best in any state. It provides the broadest protections for gay marriage dissenters. It guards those with three specific beliefs:

Marriage is the union of one man and one woman;
Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage
Man or woman refers to an individual’s immutable biological sex.

The law gives religious organizations new protections. Government may not force them to provide goods and services for a gay wedding. It can’t punish them for hiring believers who agree with their teachings. They don’t have to offer married student housing to gay married couples. They can’t be banned from running foster care or adoption agencies for their marriage policies.

Individuals also receive new protections. Government can’t punish:

Traditional believers who wish to be adoptive or foster parents.
Medical and other professionals who won’t take part in sex reassignment, fertility services, or psychological counseling.
Business owners who decline to provide goods and services for weddings.
State employees who express their beliefs. (If Georgia had passed such a law Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran would still have his job.)

The 5th Circuit three-man panel of judges did not rule on the substance. Instead they ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. Merely feeling “triggered” or stigmatized doesn’t count as a harm.

The first time a wedding photographer refuses a client, however, the law will likely be back on trial. (An aside: the law’s chances of surviving under the current Court would be stronger if it protected both gay marriage supporters and dissenters.)

he plaintiffs have requested that the whole 5th circuit review the three-judge ruling. But if this ruling stands Trump will have more time to appoint another Gorsuch to the court.

An Insight Into the Supreme Court

The good news is the Trinity Lutheran victory shows us the current Court is more supportive of religious liberty than many of us feared.

Justice Elana Kagan joined the majority opinion without any reserve. Justice Breyer wrote his own concurring opinion limiting his judgement to playground resurfacing programs and not all government benefits.

Only Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginbsurg dissented. In Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, she warned of almost apocalyptic consequences:

This ruling, “weakens this country’s longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both,” she wrote, “If this separation means anything, it means that the government cannot, or at the very least need not, tax its citizens and turn that money over to houses of worship. The court today blinds itself to the outcome this history requires and leads us instead to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.”

If so, it’s a good thing.

If religious freedom means anything it is that the government may not exclude us based on our faith. It may not tell Muslims they can’t build a mosque. It may not tell a church “Our firemen won’t protect your buildings.” It may not tell a religious school that their children’s safety doesn’t matter. (For more from the author of “Religious Liberty Wins Big at the Supreme Court” please click HERE)

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