New Supreme Court Ruling Should End Hysteria Over Religious Liberty

UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast

Conservative religious groups have long predicted that church freedom would perish at the hands of “activist judges.” But the Supreme Court’s new exemption of religious groups from discrimination laws should silence the false alarms.

In its first major religious-freedom case in decades, the Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with a Pennsylvania Lutheran school that fired a teacher after she took disability leave for narcolepsy, then returned mid-year demanding her job back. The Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Luther School, part of a church of the same name, told the teacher they had hired a contractor to take her place through the end of the year, and that they were concerned about her physical readiness to return to work. Church members offered to help pay her insurance bills if she resigned, but she threatened to sue instead. She made good on her promise when the school fired her, claiming it had illegally discriminated against her because of her disability.

The court based its decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on a long history of reverence for the “ministerial exception”—the idea that it violates the First Amendment for the state to interfere in who religious groups hire and fire. The decision hinged on a broad definition of “minister,” arguing that because she was ordained, considered “called” by God to her position, and collected religious-tax breaks, the teacher is the type of person religious groups should be able to select—and get rid of—without state interference. “The church must be free to choose who will guide it on its way,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. Though this case itself didn’t involve a hot-button issue, it firmly established that churches have the right to discriminate in hiring.

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