Given the US Constitution&#39;s 1st Amendment freedom of religion, how can current pandemic restrictions on worship be legal? The 13th amendment ending slavery and involuntary servitude, which has a big &quot;except&quot; for allowing it as a punishment for crimes. The 1st amendment has no exceptions listed though. It also has several rights squeezed into it: speech, press, religion, protest. So any threat to 1 right within it should rightly be considered a threat to the others. How can any restriction on worship gatherings be legally justified given the 1st amendment? Are there any legal precedents? Full disclosure: I am an atheist. It absolutely makes sense, from a public health and safety perspective, to put restrictions on large gatherings of any sort, for worship or otherwise. However, given the language of the 1st amendment -- and it being the legal shrine of multiple freedoms -- it seems hard to justify and a dangerous precedent from a legal perspective to enact any laws or rules abridging worship of any kind.
The First Amendment is never interpreted as a complete prohibition against laws that could affect a religion, nor is it interpreted to mean that you can say or write anything whatsoever that you want. You cannot sacrifice humans when in the name of a religion, and you cannot sacrifice (murder) humans for fun. One part of the First Amendment regarding religion is the Free Exercise clause which says that you cannot prohibit the exercise of a religion, and another, the Establishment Clause, prohibits favoring a religion, or favoring religion over atheism. The clauses about free speech also do not mean that you can commit fraud and you cannot threaten people's lives. What decides how far the government can go is &quot;strict scrutiny&quot;, a doctrine that limits the extent to which the government can infringe on fundamental rights – First Amendment rights are the canonical example of a fundamental right. The main hurdle that a law so scrutinized has to pass is that the law is necessary for a compelling government interest. Preventing massive deaths is generally seen as such an interest. Then, the law has to be narrowly tailored to affect &quot;just those cases&quot;, and it has to be the lest restrictive means of accomplishing that end. Although the prevention of massive deaths is a compelling government interest, a government might screw this up in their legal arguments, as they seem to have done in Capitol Hill Baptist Church v. Bowser, where mass political protests were allowed but smaller religious meetings were prohibited. The government essentially &quot;waived&quot; that compelling interest, replacing it with an interest in preventing church meetings, which is plainly a violation of the First Amendment – they substantially burdened religious practices.
School districts / states do generally have the power to set the curriculum including the viewpoint that will be officially conveyed. One well-known major restriction on such viewpoint restrictions is that the schools cannot restrict the free exercise of a religion, and cannot take a position on a religion. Apart from the religion third-rail, schools have pretty free reign in setting the curriculum, see Evans-Marshall v. Tipp City for one instantiation. In this case, the teacher assigned various books, including Heather Has Two Mommies, one of the books that prompted an outcry. The upshot of that case is that a teacher cannot invoke the First Amendment to override policy. This article (draft version, easier to handle) (published version, annoying footnote structure) reviews the topic, and section III covers prior cases. It notes that the cases of Lawrence, Windsor, Obergefell do not address the constitutionality of these education laws, though the reasoning in the prior cases might be applicable if there were a suit over curriculum. There is an implication that some of these rules have been enforced in the past, but most of the evidence is in the form of news stories (Beall v. London City School BOE is not available in the open). The article does engage in a somewhat deeper study of enforcement in Utah, where it was enforced (until it was repealed). Enforcement is necessarily indirect. The law require school districts to have a particular curriculum; violation would come when an individual teacher taught contrary to the prescribed curriculum. Those laws do not contain any provision like "a teacher who violates these rules gets fired", instead, punishment is via the general rule that you have to teach what is in the state-mandated curriculum. Rather than officially terminating a teacher for violating this curricular guideline, districts use vague reasons for non-renewal such as "due to problems with communication and teamwork" (from Evans-Marshall).
The Constitution does not define any crimes (except for an explicit limit on what can be considered 'treason.') It places limits on what penalties the government may apply for crimes and how crimes are tried in court, but it does not itself actually create any criminal offenses. Rather, state and federal law do that. Having said that, if a state government creates a crime of murder (which, obviously, they all do,) the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does require that that law protect all people within the jurisdiction of that state. That is, a state cannot make a law criminalizing the murder of a white person, but not of a black person, for example. States can't just pick and choose who is protected by their laws. It would not violate the U.S. Constitution if a state completely decriminalized murder, though. It's exceptionally unlikely to happen, but it would not be a violation of the Constitution. Depending on exactly what you mean by 'murder,' it could be argued that murder by the government is unconstitutional, though. The 14th Amendment bans states from depriving anyone of life without due process of law: No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Similarly, the 5th Amendment provides an equivalent protection from the federal government: No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
In Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. ___ (2022), the Supreme Court held that &quot;there is no Bivens action for First Amendment retaliation.&quot; The Court was unanimous on this point. This means that right now, there is no way to sue for a damages remedy for First Amendment retaliation by federal officials. The majority said that &quot;Congress, not the courts, is better suited to authorize such a damages remedy.&quot;
A school district has been sued for something like that. In Church of God, Etc. v. Amarillo Indep. Sch., 511 F. Supp. 613, plaintiffs successfully sued the school district "to enjoin the enforcement of the Amarillo School District's absence policy which limits the number of excused absences for religious holidays to two days each school year", where "A fundamental tenet of the Church of God is that members must abstain from secular activity on seven annual holy days". The school district imposed an absence polity where "School work missed may be made up whether an absence is excused or unexcused", and "Excused absences shall be granted to students for a maximum of 2 days for religious holidays in each school year". The court concluded that "This policy poses an unquestionable burden on the Plaintiffs' religious belief", and "This burden is not ameliorated by the make-up work provision. The provision does not require a teacher to evaluate the work made up. It in fact directs the teacher to enter a zero for that work". In this case "Summary judgment is granted and judgment rendered enjoining the enforcement of the Amarillo Independent School District's excused absence policy insofar as it limits the number of excused absences for religious holidays". This is not a matter of religious discrimination, this is a First Amendment issue. The policy is in violation of the Free Exercise clause. Eliminating spring break per se is not a problem: doing so and providing no excused absences is the problem. In the above case, there was clear a religious principle of the church to the effect that one must be off the clock on the holiday. As far as I know, there is no requirement to abstain from work or school on Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday or Good Friday. Nevertheless, in recognition of New Jersey state law which allows any student to take off a religious holiday – including Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, and dozens more – the Board of Education has prepared a list of such holidays, which includes Wiccan, Hindu, Baha'i, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Church of Scientology (and so on) religious holidays.
Actually, there is not a government kill list, that is just a meme. The First Amendment says (starts) &quot;Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...&quot;. That means a number of different concrete things: there shall be no laws prohibiting any religion, or preferring a religion, not may there be laws impeding or promoting the practice of a religion. The government therefore cannot reward or punish a person for believing in skin walkers, nor for turning themselves into a coyote (if they can do it). The old practice of burning witches at the stake is illegal, similarly at least under current understandings of the law it would be illegal to punish those without a religion with a fine or death. The aforementioned person can thus practice witchcraft – up to a point. One cannot get away with murder by claiming that they are just practicing the Ásatru ritual of blót. Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah is an example of how the government can not restrict a religious practice (banning animal sacrifices of a particular religion), Employment Division v. Smith is an example of a neutral prohibition which happens to impinge on a religion (outlawing certain drugs limits a religious practice).
This depends on how far along you're waiting for court rulings to set in, and if you count laws of Congress passed under the 13th amendment's enforcement clause. There were quite a lot of things that got ruled as violations of the 13th and 14th amendments (mostly the 14th), but many were not ruled or legislated that way for decades. Some were even ruled to have an essentially opposite effect of what the current (overturning) precedents do. "Separate but equal" was challenged on 13th amendment grounds, but was upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and wasn't overturned, on 14th amendment grounds, until 58 years later in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Your particular situation sounds like peonage, which was outlawed by Congress in 1867 via the enforcement clause. This law specifically banned "the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise." However, peonage cases continued to make their way into the courts for more than 40 years thereafter, such as Clyatt v. United States (1905)&mdash; which ruled that peonage was involuntary servitude&mdash; and Bailey v. Alabama (1911). These cases affirmed that the 13th amendment abolished not just chattel slavery but essentially all forms of involuntary or indentured servitude (except as punishment for a crime). Though exactly what qualifies as "involuntary servitude" is still something courts decide on a case-by-case basis; the draft doesn't, nor does mandatory community service to graduate high school.
In Does v Enfield, the ACLU, the ACLU of Connecticut and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the Enfield, Connecticut Board of Education. In that case, the school district agreed to stop holding the ceremonies in church. The lawsuit was brought based on the fact that the church had significant Christian iconography and banners reading "Jesus Christ is Lord" and "I am GOD." The school district agreed to stop holding ceremonies in the church after a federal judge declared plans to hold ceremonies in the church unconstitutional. The lawsuit was dropped once the school district agreed to abandon the church venue for school functions. In Elmbrook School District v. Doe, the seventh circuit court of appeals ruled against the town's plans to hold graduation ceremonies in a church and the Supreme Court declined to hear the town's appeal. In each of these cases, the school districts argued that merely using the facilities of a religious institution did not endorse the religion in violation of other Supreme Court precedents. The plaintiffs argued that exposure to the messages found within the church was enough to trigger a violation. Elmbrook School District is in the 7th circuit and the Enfield, Connecticut Board of Education is in the 3rd district. North Carolina is in the 4th district. Note that for the 7th district case, the appeals court initially found for the school district. The full circuit reconsidered and, in a 7-3 split, found that the venue could not avoid being coercive and violated the 1st amendment. In each of the cases presented here there were significant religious symbols in the venue as well as religious pamphlets, publications and bibles. The challenges were not brought based on the venue but, rather, based on the unavoidable messaging found inside those venues. It would be a completely different challenge if a graduation ceremony were held on church property in an unadorned building such as an auditorium with no religious symbols or messages. An example is Wayne Community College, in North Carolina, which has scheduled their 2017 graduation ceremony at Love Temple United Holy Church. When looking at photos of the church's auditorium one notices a lack of religious iconography and messaging. Without exposure to such iconography or other religious messaging it's possible that a public school's choice of such a venue would withstand legal challenge.