The most important step was the Hobby Lobby case, a closely held company, where the Supreme Court ruled that the owners of a company could pick and choose which parts of a law they will not obey based on religious beliefs for their company. The case in point was a part of the Affordable Care Act where women would be covered for contraceptives in the health plans. So far as I am concerned, this makes, say, Hobby Lobby a for-profit religious organization.** Please note that Judge Neil Gorsuch ruled for Hobby Lobby when he was a judge on a lower court prior to his becoming a Supreme Court Justice.
A second case involves church playgrounds.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Monday that Missouri cannot exclude a church preschool from a state program providing grants for playground resurfacing, finding the denial
constitutes religious discrimination.
Trinity Church of Columbia operates a licensed preschool on its premises and in 2012 applied for a grant with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to help pay for recycled tires to resurface the preschool’s playground.
Even though Trinity’s application ranked fifth out of 42 applications received by the DNR, it was denied based on Article 1, Section 7 of the Missouri Constitution, which states “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, section or denomination of religion.”
The DNR eventually granted 14 of the 42 applications it received.***
Let me see if I have this right, a church can get public funding to resurface their playground. This means you and I will have to pay for the resurfacing of a church playground. I at least hope that this playground is open to the public.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent slamming the majority’s opinion, and was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“To hear the Court tell it, this is a simple case about recycling tires to resurface a playground,” she wrote. “The stakes are higher. This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government—that is, between church and state. The Court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church. Its decision slights both our precedents and our history, and its reasoning weakens this country’s longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both.”***
The new law passed by the Supreme Court does seem to have some merit. For example Medicare and Medicaid do fund people in religious hospitals. Can religious hospitals only treat members of their religion? I believe the Seventh Day Adventists do allow all patients in and do not insist that those not in the faith be vegetarian in the hospital (though pork may be prohibited?). But it seems like the separation of church and state is rapidly being eased.A case to be held in October by the Supreme Court regards a Gay couple wanting a wedding cake for their upcoming marriage. The owner did not want to serve them because he was opposed to Gay marriage. We will see what happens in the fall, but, by extension of the Hobby Lobby case, I presume the bakery owner will be upheld if the bakery is a closely held business in view of Hobby Lobby. At the time of publishing the reference, the Supreme Court had refused to take up the case 16 times, but now it will.****
* http://www.pewforum.org/2009/05/14/shifting-boundaries5/
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.
*** https://www.courthousenews.com/justices-side-missouri-church-state-funding-case/\**** http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/05/31/religious-freedom-or-bigotry-supreme-court-mulls-high-stakes-gay-wedding-cake-case.html
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