Some potentially big news out of the Garden State this week deals with new rules regarding childhood vaccinations and provisions for parents who object to such treatments on religious grounds. Now that Chris Christie is out of the way and unable to ruin all the good times for Democrats, they’ve begun moving on some policy initiatives which wouldn’t have previously made it into law. One of these is a process by which it will be at least slightly more difficult for parents to exempt their children from receiving routine vaccinations due to religious objections. (ABC News)

Lawmakers in New Jersey have moved forward on a bill making it harder to get religious exemptions for required immunizations.

The State Assembly approved the bill late last week amid vocal opposition in the chamber.

The bill would require people seeking a religious exemption to submit a letter explaining how vaccines violate their faith. Opponents call that an intrusion of privacy.

First, the “difficulty” for people seeking such an exemption is set at a fairly low bar. In order to gain the religious liberty exemption you would need to submit a letter offering an explanation as to why the vaccination runs contrary to your faith. The government is going to have a pretty tough time challenging that. And to be honest, I don’t see the benefit of making this a law because it’s almost entirely toothless and does nothing but get a certain subset of the population upset. But that’s probably not the real sticking point here.

The actual debate is where the line is drawn between the freedom to live according to one’s religious convictions and the general welfare of the entire body of citizens. If you happen to be a practicing member of one of the religious sects which reject all forms of modern medicine and relies only on prayer for your child’s healthcare you’re probably going to have a much stronger case than someone who reaches this decision because they believe that vaccines cause autism. (This is an idea which has been rejected by virtually the entire medical community at this point.)

Still, the default position of the government is supposed to be (at least in theory) to honor and respect people’s religious freedom. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t cross that line on a regular basis when their beliefs run afoul of established laws or pose a direct danger to others. (You can’t deal in hallucinogenic drugs or perform human sacrifices if your faith calls for it.) That’s where the question of vaccinations gets a bit dicey. How many children in any given area can go unvaccinated before you begin reducing the “herd immunity” and putting everyone at risk? New Jersey reportedly has somewhere in the range of 10,000 students who have these religious exemptions. That’s about two percent of the school-age population of the state. If that number rose significantly higher we’d probably be looking at a potential medical crisis.

So should New Jersey’s legislators pass this bill into law? What’s the point? If you can sidestep the law with a letter it’s not going to do anything but annoy some families who follow one of those particular faiths. Perhaps a better test case would be to see if they can get the courts to agree that vaccinations have to be mandatory for everyone.