Will the extraordinary winning strip of religion to the Supreme Court continue?

Almost three years have passed since the last time the Supreme Court listened to topics in one case that turned on one of the religion clauses of the first amendment, a curious cradle in what had been a signature project for the court led by the chief judge John G. Roberts Jr.: To strengthen the place of faith in public life.

The break is over. In the space of a month this spring, the Court will listen to three important cases of religion. The first, to be discussed on Monday, asks if a Catholic charity organization in Wisconsin should receive a tax exemption. In April, the Court will evaluate if a Catholic Charter school in Oklahoma is constitutional and if parents with religious objections to the curriculum in Maryland schools can withdraw their children from the classes.

As a whole, the three cases will test the limits of the assertive vision of the religious freedom of the court, which was one of his distinctive commitments for more than a decade.

Since 2012, when the Court unanimously governed The fact that religious groups were often exempt from the laws on discrimination of work, the re-religion side won all the decisions except one of the 16 decisions signed in supported cases that concerned the prohibition of the first amendment for the establishment of the government of religion and its protection of the free exercise of religion.

“Religious freedom has been in a winning series to the Supreme Court since 2012,” said Eric Rassbach, a lawyer from Becket Fund for Religeus Liberty, which represents the complaints in two of the three cases to be supported this spring. “It is not yet on par with freedom of speech, but a lot is approaching.”

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh expressed satisfaction with the general trend in Observations at the Columbus School of Law of the Catholic University In September. Asked to identify “some of the great themes of the cases of court’s religious freedom in recent years”, he said, “we have made correct and important giant steps” in “recognizing the constitutional protection of religious equality and religious freedom”.

Not everyone is happy with the general trend or where it seems to go.

“The trio of religion of this spring the cases of religion threatens nothing more than to tear the fundamental structures of American law and life,” said Justin Driver, professor of law in Yale, adding that the Court has constantly moved the protection of the free exercise at the center of the relegation phase of the concerns on the government with the religion to the wings. The two cases of education, said Professor Driver, are particularly irritated.

“The Supreme Court of this term could plausibly destroy the American public school as we have known it in recent decades,” he said. “Of course, many conservatives will consider that destruction not as a vice, but a virtue.”

There was an exception to the winning series of religion on the field in the last decade: the judges’ Refusal in 2018 of a challenge to the prohibition of the Trump administration to travel from different mainly Muslim countries.

This is saying, said Rachel Laser, president of the Americans united for the separation between the Church and the State. “The law used to bend back to protect religious minorities,” he said. “Now they are Christians and often conservative Christians, who are repeatedly favored by the judgments of the Supreme Court.”

The Court has established in recent years that state programs in support of private schools Maine AND Montana It must allow parents to choose religious ones, an advantage for Christian schools. On April 30, the Court will listen to topics on a variation on this question, but with an important turning point.

The new case asks if the Oklahoma should use the government’s money to pay a religious charter school, St. Isidore of the Catholic Virtual School of Seville, to be managed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa and dedicated to instilling his curriculum with Catholic teaching.

In the previous cases, schools were private. According to the law of Oklahoma, Charter schools are public.

“It would be a change of sea to allow public schools, or any school financed directly with dollars of taxes, to be religious schools,” said Mrs. Laser. “You are talking about the school of your neighborhood that becomes a Sunday school.”

Gentner Drummond, Public Prosecutor of Oklahoma, Republican, opposed the school of religious Charter and the Supreme Court of Oklahoma ruled against itBy saying that he violated the ban on the first amendment for the establishment of the government of religion and the ban on the state constitution of spending public money to support religious institutions.

In his short the Supreme Court of the United States, He supported the school which is like those in cases of Maine and Montana.

St. Isidore “hopes to offer another educational option For Oklahoma, and no student will be forced to attend St. Isidore, “said the brief.” Rather, the school will receive state students and funding, only through the private choices of families “.

Douglas Laycock, professor of law at the University of Virginia, said the case, Oklahoma State Charter School Board v. DrummondNo. 24-394, “almost reduces to a characterization problem”.

“Is a Charter school a public school with private management or is it a private school with public funding?” he asked.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett retired from the case but did not say why. He is a former professor of law in Notre Dame, whose clinic of religious freedom represents the Charter schoolAnd he is an intimate friend of Nicole Garnett, a professor there who helped St. Isidore.

A second case involving schools, Mahmoud v. TaylorNo. 24-297, will be discussed on April 22nd and asks if the Constitution gives the parents of the students of public schools the right to excuse their children from the discussion in class on fairy tales with characters and LGBTQ themes.

The public schools of the County Montgomery, the largest school system in Maryland, introduced fairy tales books in the autumn of 2022. For most of the academic year, school administrators pointed out to parents when fairytale books, together with the opportunity to bring out their children from those sessions. But in the spring of 2023 the school system announced that he would no longer point out to his parents or let them give up the lessons.

The lawyers of the school system he told the judges Opt-out requests were difficult to administer, they brought to high absenteeism for stigmatized and isolated students and students who believed the books represented them.

Several parents, including Roman Muslims and Catholics, sued, saying that the new policy has burdened their religious rights.

Michael McConnell, professor of law in Stanford and former judge of the federal court of appeal he presented a brief support for parentsHe said the curriculum was an assault on religious freedom.

“The issue below is if public schools must be used as an ideological persuasion tool,” he said. “These textbooks are to teach reading and, in my opinion, it is highly questionable that in the choice of which books teaching for reading do not choose them on the basis of their literary or grammatical value or other, but rather because they are trying to undermine parents’ beliefs”.

Professor Driver, who presented a brief support for the school systemI saw it differently. “A decision that allows Flyspeck parents of the curricular decisions of public schools would have brought the American educational system to a break,” he said.

The third case, Catholic Charities Bureau against Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review CommissionNo. 24-154, be discussed on Monday, He asks if Wisconsin was free to deny a tax exemption to a Catholic charity organization for the fact that his activities were not mainly religious.

The Supreme Court of Wisconsin ruled This is because the beneficial organization does not “try to imbue participants in the program with the Catholic faith or provide religious materials to the participants or employees of the program”, his work does not qualify for the exemption. Another strike against the charity organization, said the court, was that it did not limit employment or its services on the basis of religion.

Dissenting justice said that the majority made a mistake in “answering theological questions well beyond the vomina of the judiciary”.

If the story is a reliable guide, the topics of the Charter school, charity and parents will receive a friendly reception in court.

A study of 2021 Of religion sentences in cases supported by the head of judge John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court in 2005 discovered that the nature of his sentences had changed from those issued by the courts led by the judges Capo Earl Warren, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist.

The study, conducted by Lee Epstein, of the University of Washington in St. Louis, and Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago, discovered that Roberts court has governed in favor of religious people and groups over 83 percent of the times, compared to about 50 percent of the time since 1953.

“In most of these cases, the winning religion was a traditional Christian organization, while in the past the results in favor of religion more frequently favored minorities or marginal religious organizations,” they wrote.

The study took into consideration the cases that activated the religious clauses of the first amendment, but religion also figured in other cases. In 2023, for example, the Court unanimously governed In favor of a postal worker who refused to work on his Saturday based on a law on the discrimination of work. In the same year, divided from 6 to 3 In favor of a web designer who did not want to create sites for homosexual weddings in the field of freedom clause of the first amendment.

The rate of pro-religion judgments by the Roberts court has increased since the study was conducted, to 86 %, discovered Professor Epstein. If the Court govern in favor of religious claims in all three in suspense cases, the rate will increase, at 88 percent.