Supreme Court unanimously agrees with Catholic charity in jobless-fund case
Dispute hinged on whether secular support services can be a religious activity
A church’s charitable work can be considered religious in nature for the purpose of certain tax laws even if it doesn’t include overt religious activity such as worship or proselytizing, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed today.
The case was Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, in which a Catholic charity that provides a variety of services to people with disabilities had sought permission to pay into a Catholic-run unemployment insurance program rather than the Wisconsin state unemployment fund. Wisconsin, like most other states, exempts religious organizations from the unemployment compensation tax for some employees.
Wisconsin had said that the Catholic Charities Bureau did not qualify for the exemption because its activities were not primarily religious in nature; the Wisconsin Supreme Court had agreed, nothing that the CCB’s programs were not different from similar programs offered by secular entities and did not include markers of religious activities such as worship, religious education and proselytizing, and the services were not limited to Catholics.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the Supreme Court in today’s 9-01 ruling, said, in effect, that it is up to religious entities, not the government, to determine what types of activities are religious in nature, and to say otherwise is giving preference to religions based on their beliefs:
Decisions about whether to “express and inculcate religious doctrine” through worship, proselytization, or religious education when performing charitable work are, again, fundamentally theological choices driven by the content of different religious doctrines. …
It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain “neutrality between religion and religion.” … There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one. When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny.
It is not clear how extensive the ramifications of today’s ruling will be. Activists who had urged the Supreme Court to adopt the opposite position have raised concerns that siding with the charity could lead to the loss of unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands who work for hospitals and other health-care entities sponsored by religious organizations.
Although all justices agreed with the result, two justices wrote concurring opinions differing with the reasoning of the majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion focused on the need for religious organizations to have autonomy; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson focused on the intent of Congress in the way it drafted a federal law regulating unemployment compensation.