This month, with the deadline arriving in New York City for public employees to be vaccinated or face termination, fifteen public school teachers went to court claiming that the rejection of their applications for an exemption violated their religious freedom rights. The city had previously agreed to allow employees to apply for exemptions for either religious or medical reasons, but made no assurances that such applications would be granted. The teachers in question had all requested religious exemptions but were denied, leading to the legal appeal. On Friday night, in an emergency ruling, Sonia Sotomayor rejected the appeal without comment, allowing the terminations to move forward. At least for now, that appears to be the end of the saga. (NY Post)

The Supreme Court on Friday shot down an appeal from a group of New York City school teachers who sought to block a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, arguing it violated their religious freedom.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected the emergency appeal on Friday, the same day as the deadline for city employees to comply with the mandate or face losing their jobs.

Sotomayor did not offer an explanation, which is the court’s usual procedure.

The Wise Latina’s failure to comment on the ruling isn’t unusual. That’s generally how these emergency appeal rulings are handled. If a separate case is heard by the full court later on, we might expect to hear their rationale.

This decision really isn’t out of step with the court’s previous rulings on related challenges. The Supremes have proven to be skeptical of the federal government’s ability to issue such sweeping mandates, but they’ve been far more tolerant of state and municipal mandates. Several of Joe Biden’s mandates have been shut down, while challenges to rules imposed by state and city governments have been allowed to stand.

The basis for New York City’s rules regarding religious exemptions should definitely come under further scrutiny, however. The rules require that “religious leaders” back up the request for exemptions on religious grounds. In this challenge, the teachers in question claimed that the city would not honor exemption requests from Catholics because the Pope has already urged all Catholics to get vaccinated.

But what about Protestants of various strains that don’t have one centralized leader of the entire faith? The United Methodist Church in America has the Council of Bishops as its ruling body. Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey is currently President of the Council. So if she tells her flock that they don’t need to be vaccinated if they don’t wish to be, would the City of New York be forced to grant exemptions to everyone claiming to be a Methodist but still deny all of the Catholics?

And what of all of the non-denominational people who claim to be “spiritual” without associating themselves with any organized religion? They really don’t have any sort of “official religious leaders” to turn to for guidance. The point is that most religious participation in America is largely informal. Nobody is issuing official membership cards that I know of. As such, it’s almost impossible for such a rule to be applied evenly to everyone.

At some point, the state of emergency will be fully gone (we’re already very close to that situation now) and the mandates will be gone with them. At that point, there’s going to be a lot of messy cleanup work to do in the courts. And we have a lot of questions that the government needs to answer before the next pandemic or other national states of emergency come along.