How does the Supreme Court address free exercise challenges today?
About this video
The speaker sorts free exercise cases into two groups. Easy but rare cases are ones where the government openly discriminates against religion, which it clearly cannot do. The hard cases involve a law that applies to everyone, where a religious person asks to be exempt because the law burdens their religious practice.
You'll be able to
- explain why cases where the government openly targets religion are 'easy'.
- describe the kind of free exercise case the Court has struggled with.
- tell the difference between a law that singles out religion and a general law that burdens it.
Key words
- Free exercise
- The First Amendment right to practise your religion.
- Discriminate
- To treat someone worse because of who they are or what they believe.
- On its face
- What a law says in its actual words, before looking at its effects.
- Exemption
- Permission not to follow a rule that applies to other people.
Transcript
I think the way to think about this is that there are a set of free exercise cases that are easy, but rare. These are the cases if the government just says, Catholics can't apply for government jobs or the government says, we're going to allow people to do a certain activity, but not if it's religious. All those cases are easy the government can't do that. They can't just set out to discriminate against religion, they can't separate out religion for affirmative, unfavorable treaty. But that's been pretty clear for quite some time. You really don't see many of those cases. The cases that the court has instead, really struggled with, are what happens when you have a law that on its face, says, nobody can do a certain
activity. Then you have people who say, wait a second, what the government has said, nobody can do is really important to me and my religion. In order for me to have the free exercise of my religion, I essentially need to be exempt from a law that applies to other people. This is an area that the court has had, again, a lot of trouble struggling with.
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