At long last, all defendants in our lawsuit to restore religious exemptions for schoolchildren in Connecticut and beyond have filed their briefs in response to our petition for U.S. Supreme Court review. You may recall that the State and three school board defendants twice requested extensions of time to file, moving the deadline from March 6, 2024 to May 20, 2024.
You can read the State’s entire brief here, but to summarize, the thrust of its legal argument is that there was a public health crisis in Connecticut caused by “skyrocketing” religious exemptions, which necessitated the removal of the religious exemption that had been in place since 1959 (unbelievably, they characterize the religious exemption as a “relatively recent innovation” in Connecticut law). The State asserts that religious exemptions posed such a threat to public health, in fact, that even if they were required to demonstrate a compelling state interest for removing the religious exemption under strict scrutiny analysis, they would be able to prove that one existed. This is a point that we thoroughly dispute, and they fail to mention one very critical fact – i.e., that we were denied the opportunity to participate in discovery which would have compelled the State to provide actual data to prove that the religious exemptions were rising to the extent that they posed any threat at all to public health in Connecticut – let alone a significant one. We are confident that, were we given that opportunity, the evidence would clearly demonstrate the opposite.
The State also argues that this case cannot provide a mechanism to revisit or overrule Employment Division v. Smith, as we argue in our petition. The State maintains that its repeal law was neutral and generally applicable, since it applied equally to people of all faiths, and was not hostile to any particular religion. But this is clearly inaccurate to say the least, since the law absolutely targeted those with religious beliefs opposed to vaccinations by denying them an education on that basis, while leaving the doors to the schoolhouse wide open to anyone who does not hold such beliefs. We believe Smith contains flawed legal reasoning that has unjustly allowed states like Connecticut to infringe on religious liberty with near impunity, so long as they can make out a case that their laws are “neutral” and “generally applicable” – words that are found nowhere in the First Amendment.
Finally, the State argues that the Supreme Court has, since Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905, consistently held that the state possesses police power to issue vaccine mandates. But this argument is a red herring, since we are not challenging those rulings in our case. Our point is simply that Connecticut’s elimination of the religious exemption in 2021 ran afoul of the Constitution, not that the state has no power to enact a school vaccine mandate. While many would like us to make that argument, we knew from the start that a challenge on that basis would fail, for the very reasons cited by the State here. So for the State to attack an argument we never even made is puzzling, to say the least.
So what’s next? We are already hard at work preparing our reply brief to rebut the State’s arguments, which we expect to file by next Friday, May 31, 2024. Then all briefs will be distributed to the Justices, for consideration at their upcoming conferences. If the Justices vote to grant our petition, our case will be scheduled for oral argument before the Court, which would take place in October at the earliest (this month marks the end of the Court’s hearings for this session, and it will not resume hearings until after its summer break, in October). We are hoping the Court will make a decision by the end of June, in which case we will immediately notify all of our followers and subscribers.
If you know of others who are interested in following this case, please encourage them to subscribe to our email list for all of the latest updates. And please also consider making a donation to support our efforts. This case continues to exhaust many thousands of dollars of our resources, to pay for everything from legal fees to printing costs. As a nonprofit with very limited resources, it has been a long and expensive road to the Supreme Court, but we will never stop fighting for the rights of these families in Connecticut. If we are victorious, religious exemptions could also be restored in California, New York, and Maine. It is no overstatement to say that this could be the biggest case for health freedom and religious liberty in our lifetimes. Thank you in advance for your support!