“For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom,” Justice Samuel Alito told the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, in November. “It pains me to say this, but, in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.”
Those quarters do not include the Supreme Court, which has become far more likely to rule in favor of religious rights in recent years, according to a new study that considered 70 years of data.
The study, to be published in The Supreme Court Review, documented a 35-percentage-point increase in the rate of rulings in favor of religion in orally argued cases, culminating in an 81% success rate in the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts.
“Plainly, the Roberts court has ruled in favor of religious organizations, including mainstream Christian organizations, more frequently than its predecessors,” wrote the study’s authors, Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis and Eric A. Posner of the University of Chicago. “With the replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett, this trend will not end soon and may accelerate.”
The kinds of cases the court is hearing have changed, too. In the Warren court, all of the rulings in favor of religion benefited minority or dissenting practitioners. In the Roberts court, most of the religious claims were brought by mainstream Christians.
The five most pro-religion justices all sit on the current court, the study found.
“The justices who are largely responsible for this shift are Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh,” the study’s authors wrote. “While there are some differences among these justices, and Kavanaugh has been involved in only a handful cases, they are clearly the most pro-religion justices on the Supreme Court going back at least until World War II.” All are Republican appointees.
In the last term alone, the court sided with Christian religious groups in three argued cases. The court ruled that state programs supporting private schools must include religious ones, that the Trump administration could allow employers with religious objections to deny contraception coverage to female workers and that employment discrimination laws do not apply to many teachers at religious schools.
And the court will soon decide whether Philadelphia may bar a Catholic agency that refused to work with same-sex couples from screening potential foster parents.
After Barrett joined the court, it changed positions on the one question on which religious groups had been losing: whether governors could restrict attendance in houses of worship to address the coronavirus pandemic….
The above comes from a New York Times story via an April 5 posting in YahooNews.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2021 The New York Times Company
Regardless of whether you dislike or like Mr. Trump, the Supreme Court will be part of his legacy as President.
The Court, like the rest of government, isn’t supposed to be friendly to religion. It is supposed to be neutral towards religion.
First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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FYI – the Supreme Court again ruled that government can be no more hostile to religion than to business:
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of religious complainants against a California COVID restriction on in-home religious gatherings. The majority ruled: “The State cannot ‘assume the worst when people go to worship but assume the best when people go to work.’” The high court also noted: “This is the fifth time the Court has summarily rejected the Ninth Circuit’s analysis of California’s COVID restrictions on religious exercise.”