When wingnuts leave Antonin Scalia in their dust
The funny (funny weird, but a little funny ha-ha) thing about the tension between civil law and religious conviction is that the key decisions on the topic were written by Antonin Scalia and are not friendly to claims that religion trumps law.
If a law applies to everyone and was not devised for the purpose of disadvantaging a religious viewpoint and has a rational basis (the lowest threshold... rational doesn't mean right, correct or good policy, it just means there is some arguable reason beyond the purely arbitrary) then you have to follow the law, regardless of your religious convictions.
Peyote is illegal. (federally) Some native Americans employ employ in religious exercise.
Since the anti-peyote law is of general application and has a rational purpose beyond fucking with certain native American religions then the law is not about religion and its interference with religious exercise is just what happens. Scalia settled all that decades ago.
Every law we can think of will interfere with the free exercise of some hypothetical religion.
If religion happens to collide with general law then too bad for religion. Your religion says it is a sin to pay for parking? Too bad. Try arguing that in court.
The school teaches that the Earth is billions of years old. Your religion says otherwise.
Is everyone in the class taught that? Yes. Fundementalist Christians are not singled out. Is it taught for the purpose of mocking some religion? No. It's governmental purpose is to teach kids how old the Earth actually is as part of a fact-based education, not to contradict some other veiwpoint. Is there a some rational purpose to it other than contradicting the bible? Yes. Science education is considered a proper educational goal.
Crack-pottery like demands that Obamacare not apply to Catholics, or that public accommodations be allowed to discriminate on a religious basis seek to privilege religious conviction as above civil law.
And even if Scalia agrees with that today in the case of Catholicism (he probably does), his wingnut buddies have left Scalia's actual legal reasoning (which is the law of the land, BTW) in the dust.
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