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The guarantee of Free Speech exists next to the religious freedom guarantees in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. These rights often intersect, as the ability to speak according to one’s conscience is innate to almost any conscientious belief system in existence. To apply restrictions to speech would also be applying restrictions to the exercise of religion.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that plaintiffs whose religious rights were violated can sue government employees individually for monetary damages.
The language of the new Los Angeles COVID restriction specifically exempts religious gatherings as a matter of constitutional right.
In a major victory for religious congregations, delivered late on Thanksgiving Eve, the United States Supreme Court blocked the state of New York from implementing gathering restrictions that the Court ruled discriminate against religious congregations.
What if the church is a place where lives are transformed from the inside out, where people make decisions to follow Christ, and find not only find community, but actual real and powerful solutions to their failing marriage, their chronic mental illnesses, their abject loneliness, their anger and fear and judgment, and pain?
In June, a Florida Seventh-day Adventist school that received state and federal funding fired a teacher because of his sexual orientation.
On October 6, 2020, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case on the issue of whether individual FBI agents can be held financially liable if they are found to have violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The underlying case involves Muslim-Americans who alleged that individual FBI agents put them on the “no fly” list after they refused to act as informants against fellow Muslims in terrorism-related investigations.
The Satanic Temple is asserting a free exercise right to abortion as a religious ritual in lawsuits against the state of Missouri and against a Louisiana advertising agency.
Contempt of court is a quasi-criminal act, and the court cannot punish someone for breaking a regulation if that regulation is not constitutional.
Ginsburg wrote little on the religion clauses, but she frequently joined with those Justices who favored a strong separation of church and state.