VACCINE EXEMPTIONSAs SCOTUS Rejects Emergency Appeal for Religious Exemption to Vaccines, Thorny First Amendment Issues Persist
Since May, more than a half dozen petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court by people who claim mandatory vaccine policies have harmed their right to religious freedom. The issue is not going away.
A mother in New York State who claims to oppose vaccines because of her Catholic faith lost an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) this week—though Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted her application. For now, the woman’s kindergarten-aged son must be vaccinated to attend school.
Legal scholars who spoke to CIDRAP News were not surprised this particular appeal failed, but agreed that the Supreme Court might soon address the issue of religious exemptions to vaccines.
SCOTUS has “moved steadily closer to advancing” free exercise rights under the First Amendment, which protects people’s ability to practice religion without government interference, explained James G. Hodge Jr., JD, LLM, director of Arizona State University’s Center for Public Health Law and Policy.
“It would not surprise me to see this Court strip states of its denials of religious exemptions given repeated, annual requests in manifold other cases seeking the Court’s decision on this question,” he said.
While opposition to vaccine mandates is stronger among Republicans, it’s hard to know how the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices might vote, said Marci Ann Hamilton, JD, MA, a senior fellow in the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and former clerk to the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
The Catholic Church supports vaccine mandates, and Hamilton said that might influence the conservative justices, five of whom are practicing Catholics. Additionally, conservative Justice Gorsuch, now an Episcopalian, was raised Catholic, as was liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson are Jewish and nondenominational Protestant, respectively.
The First Amendment Protects Religious Freedom, but to What Point?
The religious vaccine exemption case that might stand the strongest chance of winning at the Supreme Court also comes out of New York, one of four states that don’t permit personal or religious exemptions for school vaccine requirements.
In Miller v. McDonald, a group of Amish parents whose children attend private schools in Upstate New York claim their faith prohibits vaccination.
The case has volleyed from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court, which told the lower court to reconsider Miller in light of another religious freedom case, Mahmoud v. Taylor.
