Religious Freedom is for Everyone John O. McGinnis

The Roberts Court has been criticized for wielding its power of judicial review under the Free Exercise Clause and its power to interpret statutes like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act ( RFRA ) to protect Christians perceived to be in the majority and not just minority religions that had previously been the objects of judicial solicitude. As one news story put it, [o]bservers question why the court needs to repeatedly intervene on behalf of a religion that has historically held plenty of political and cultural power.

That kind of critique has been suggested in the run-up to a case, Groff v. DeJoy, which will be argued this month. There Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian who was a postal worker, claimed that his religion required him to avoid working on the Sabbath and thus he invoked a provision of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that requires companies to accommodate such workers unless doing so would cause undue hardship. Almost a half-century ago, the Court in a case that involved a Jehovah s Witness made the statute s protection very narrow by defining hardship to a company very broadly as anything more than de minimis cost. Groff is arguing that the past interpretation was wrong.

But this particular complaint about the Roberts Court is mistaken on many levels. First, the Court has recently intervened on behalf of non-Christian religions that are clearly a minority, even when its practitioners are convicted criminals. Second, many Christians, like those that adhere to traditional teachings on morality to which the Court has extended protection, are a minority in this country. Finally, there is no principled way to interpret the law to make the protection of religious practices depend on the level of support the practice enjoys. Indeed, the complaints about the protection of these practices themselves reflect a long-standing animus against traditional Christianity and sometimes the Western tradition of which it was a principal component.

via lawliberty.org

Many of our brothers and sisters in the Woke religion find the First Amendment intensely irritating and even offensive. This is just one of the reasons to like the First Amendment.

This is John O. McGinnis btw.