The Supreme Court opens its new term Monday facing a docket that will decide whether religious Americans can operate schools according to their conscience and whether parents have the final say over their children's moral and medical upbringing.
For decades, the court prioritized the left's preferred doctrine of "separation of church and state" to sideline believers from public life. Now, the court's conservative majority is poised to flip that framework, demanding the state stop discriminating against people of faith. The institutional left is banking on the court preserving the status quo where secular orthodoxy rules and conscience is subordinated.
NPR highlights the term's biggest ripple-effect case: a dispute out of Colorado over religious school funding. NPR framed the issue as the court potentially "requiring taxpayers to fund religious schools that refuse to admit LGBTQ students and parents." Stripped of the spin, the legal question is whether the government can exclude religious institutions from generally available public programs simply because they uphold traditional beliefs on sexuality. Last term, the justices deadlocked 4-4 on a similar Oklahoma case after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, leaving in place an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that barred overtly religious charter schools from funding. With Barrett participating this term, the landscape shifts. As Michigan State University law professor Frank Ravitch told NPR, "It's literally the opposite of what the law was not that long ago, and it's just a complete shift."
Yahoo reports the court will also weigh in on parental authority by hearing a challenge to a Washington state law. That law allows operators of emergency shelters to withhold contact from parents of runaway youth who identify as transgender and are seeking "gender-affirming care." A group of parents sued, arguing the state is usurping their fundamental right to direct their children's upbringing. For people of faith, this is the state actively facilitating the undermining of the family unit and circumventing parents who object to experimental medical interventions on religious grounds.
Meanwhile, the court's emergency "shadow docket" continues to eclipse the merits docket. Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck notes to NPR that there are now "twice as many full court rulings on emergency applications as we have on the merits docket." Lower court judges complain about the lack of guidance, but the reality is the executive branch has often been forced to leapfrog hostile lower appellate courts to get basic relief.
The court has the votes to restore religious liberty and parental rights to their proper constitutional standing. The open question is whether they have the nerve to use them against a secular establishment that insists on conformity.
