Religious Liberty Cases Among Supreme Court’s Key Cases This Session
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide several cases about religious liberty and other issues important to Christians in the new session that opened on Monday.
“There’s a couple of religious freedom cases,” Carrie Severino, president of Judicial Network, told Fox News Digital. “We have a couple cases that touch on state and federal preemption, but I’m not sure there’s an easy theme for all of them.”
St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy tests whether Colorado can exclude Catholic preschools from its universal preschool program because of religious policies barring same-sex couples and LGBT students from attending the schools, which conflicts with the state’s nondiscrimination requirements.
The state provides funding to private preschools that participate in the program but requires them to follow state anti-discrimination rules covering sexual orientation and gender identity. The Catholic schools argue those rules clash with their religious beliefs and that they should not have to abandon their policies to receive the same funding available to other private schools.
“They don’t agree with the state on things like allowing children to use the opposite sex bathroom if they identify with the opposite sex,” Severino said. “So, this is something the Supreme Court has been very favorable to religious organizations of and for not allowing states to just cut them out of otherwise generally applicable state benefit programs.”
Perhaps the most-watched case this term is Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. It centers on whether Colorado officials can use state tort law to seek damages from oil giants Suncor and ExxonMobil for alleged climate-related harms or whether federal law blocks those claims.
“If Colorado actually succeeds on its nuisance claims and others against these companies, the upshot would not just be these companies changing what they do in a way to protect Colorado or remedy Colorado, but rather it would affect their operations far outside of the state,” said Adam White, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “And the question is, can Colorado courts reach outside of their own state and try in effect to regulate?”
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear more than two dozen cases this session and still could pick up more.
–Lee Hartman
#SupremeCourt #ReligiousLiberty #FirstAmendment #Colorado #ClimateLitigation
