Supreme Court asks for new review of New York’s removal of religious vaccine exemption
Decision revives legal claims of Amish parents and schools opposed to mandate
The U.S. Supreme Court signaled yesterday that it may be interested in reviewing whether states can be required to provide religious exemptions to vaccine mandates.
The court did so in the case of Miller v. McDonald, in which a group of parents and Amish schools are challenging a law passed by New York state lawmakers in 2019 to remove the religious exemption in its vaccine mandate that applies to schoolchildren while retaining a medical exemption. The parents and schools were appealing a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upholding the law.
The high court’s decision was to send the case back to the appeals court so the lower court could determine how the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling in June, made after the appeals court’s decision, might affect the ruling. The decision to remand came in the form of a brief, unsigned order without any explanation or recorded dissent, which is common when the Supreme Court wants a lower court to review a ruling because legal circumstances have changed since the lower court’s decision was made.
Mahmoud v. Taylor is the case where the Supreme Court sided with parents who had challenged a Maryland school district’s policy of not allowing parents to opt their children out of classes where storybooks described as “LGTBQ-inclusive” would be read. The court based its decision partly on earlier precedents that point to the right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children.
Although yesterday’s decision revived the Amish challenge to the New York law, it does not necessarily indicate that the Supreme Court is ready to side with the Amish. The appeals court, and ultimately the Supreme Court, could decide that vaccine mandates and curricular decisions raise substantially different legal issues.
The appeals court had decided Miller v. McDonald relying primarily on the precedent set by Employment Division v. Smith, a landmark 1990 case in which the Supreme Court had upheld the denial of state unemployment benefits to a worker who had been fired for using peyote as part of a Native American religious ritual. The essence of the ruling was the government could enforce laws passed for secular purposes even though they infringe on religious activities as long as the laws are “neutral and generally applicable” to people regardless of their religious belief. In other words, Employment Division v. Smith found that the government isn’t required to accommodate all religious practices.
New York is an outlier in not providing for a religious exemption to vaccine mandates. According to the petition for a Supreme Court hearing, only three other states — California, Maine and Connecticut — do not have such an exemption.