Religious Exemptions for Vaccine Mandates Shouldn't Exist
COVID VACCINE MANDATES are proliferating—and so, inevitably, are attempts to evade them by claiming a religious exemption. In Washington state, a church-affiliated group hosts “vaccine exemption workshops” for state employees, health workers, and school staff. On Facebook, people swap tips for couching vaccine hesitancy in religious terms. In Texas, employees are suing United Airlines over its policy of placing religious objectors on unpaid leave, one of many legal challenges to mandates around the country.
The success or failure of those lawsuits will go a long way toward determining how many people end up claiming exemptions. What’s clear for now is that there are still millions of Americans who say they will refuse to be vaccinated and very little stopping most of them from claiming a religious exemption if they want to.
All of which makes now a good time to reconsider the whole idea of religious exemptions from vaccine mandates. Under examination, they turn out to be a policy in search of a rationale—ostensibly designed to protect religious faith, but instead overwhelmingly used in bad faith.
THE FIRST AMENDMENT restricts the government from prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion. For most of American history, this did not include religious exemptions from secular laws that apply to everyone. As the Supreme Court observed in 1879, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.” Congress can’t tell you what to believe, the Court ruled, but it can tell you what to do.
https://www.wired.com/story/religious-exemption-covid-vaccine-mandate-supreme-court-law/
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