The recent Hobby Lobby case reminded me of something. A few years back, Employment Division v. Smith - 1980 to be precise, the Supreme Court ruled on a case where someone was saying they should have a religious exemption from a law. The Court ruled against him with a vote of 6-3. This is part of the majority opinion in that case. If the compelling interest test is to be applied at all, then, it must be applied across the board, to all actions thought to be religiously commanded. Moreover, if compelling interest really means what it says (and watering it down here would subvert its rigor in the other fields where it is applied), many laws will not meet the test. Any society adopting such a system would be courting anarchy, but that danger increases in direct proportion to the societys diversity of religious beliefs, and its determination to coerce or suppress none of them. Precisely because we are a cosmopolitan nation made up of people of almost every conceivable religious preference, Braunfeld v. Brown, and precisely because we value and protect that religious divergence, we cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to the religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the highest order. The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind -- ranging from compulsory military service, see, e.g., Gillette v. United States (1971), to the payment of taxes, see, e.g., United States v. Lee, supra; to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, see, e.g., Funkhouser v. State (Okla.Crim.App.1988), compulsory vaccination laws, see, e.g., Cude v. State (1964), drug laws, see, e.g., Olsen v. Drug Enforcement Administration (1989), and traffic laws, see Cox v. New Hampshire (1941); to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, see Susan and Tony Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), child labor laws, see Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), animal cruelty laws, see, e.g., Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye Inc. v. City of Hialeah (S.D.Fla.1989), cf. State v. Massey (1949), environmental protection laws, see United States v. Little (Mont.1986), and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races, see, e.g., Bob Jones University v. United States (1983). The First Amendments protection of religious liberty does not require this. What the author of the opinion was saying was that anyone with a religious objection to a civil law could claim an exemption from that law and due to the wide range of religions in this nation, the result would be anarchy. Each of the referenced cases above was someone trying to do just that in each example. The author of the majority opinion in that case was Antonin Scalia.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:57:39 +0000