Catholic Church Says Federal Court Has No Jurisdiction Over It, Because Religious Freedom
It is a case that has never been seen in this country before – and a harbinger of the religious right’s attacks on America yet to come. If you thought Hobby Lobby was extreme, you haven’t seen anything yet.
The St. Vincent de Paul School in Fort Wayne, Indiana is a small Catholic school of about 800 students. In 2012, Emily Herx was an English teacher there, and had been trying for a year to conceive. Like many women, she decided to try in-vitro fertilization, which required her to request some time off. At first, as Mother Jones reports, she was met with what she thought was support from her supervisor. “You are in my prayers.” Not even two weeks later, she was met with a pink slip.
Herx was labeled by one monsignor a “grave, immoral sinner,” merely for trying to have a family.
And so she’s suing the St. Vincent de Paul School and the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese for firing her.
Of course, the school and diocese are arguing “freedom of religion” allows them to hire and fire at will.
But they are also using an argument that has never been tried before, at least in America: Freedom of religion and the First Amendment mean they don’t even have to show up in court. In short, they are arguing the State has no jurisdiction over them, because of the First Amendment.
“[If] the diocese is required to go through a trial,” attorneys for the diocese and school argued, it would “irrevocably” deny Fort Wayne-South Bend the benefits of religious protection. Herx’s attorneys are fighting the appeal.
If they are successful – and yes, this could conceivably go to the Supreme Court – it would mean an entirely separate State exists, in essence, for religious institutions in America. Not only would they be tax-exempt, they would be law-exempt.
“I’ve never seen this before, and I couldn’t find any other cases like it,” Brian Hauss, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Center for Liberty told Mother Jones.
“What the diocese is saying is, ‘We can fire anybody, and we have absolute immunity from even going to trial, as long as we think they’re violating our religion. And to have civil authorities even look into what we’re doing is a violation.’…It’s astonishing,” Hauss adds.
Louise Melling, a deputy legal director at the ACLU, was more critical: “It’s an unusual and extreme argument, to be saying the court doesn’t even have the legal authority to ask whether this was, in fact, sex discrimination. I can’t imagine they would prevail on that. It’s too extreme.”
Than again, Melling says she never would have predicted the recent wave of cases in which religious institutions asserted that they have an expansive right to discriminate. One of those cases was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the Supreme Court case that struck down the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The ACLU has also seen a climb in the number of Christian schools arguing that Title VII allows them to fire women who undergo IVF or become pregnant outside of marriage, or to fire employees who engage in same-sex relationships. “Hobby Lobby was just one case in this wave,” Melling says.
Conservatives, however, don’t see it as “extreme” at all.
Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, says the diocese’s assertion is a “perfectly sensible argument.” Laycock, who has successfully argued numerous religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court, notes there is precedent for immunizing certain organizations from trial, although not necessarily under Title VII’s religious protections. “I think it’s going to be a hard sell,” he says. “But I don’t know that it’s ‘extreme.'”
Many Americans believe the Hobby Lobby case was extreme as well.Â
But as it turns out, Hobby Lobby was just the beginning.
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Image via Flickr
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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.
MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”
The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”
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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”
Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”
Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”
The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”
MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”
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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.
The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.
“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
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Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.
Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”
The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.
Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”
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President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.
That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.
His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
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The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”
Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”
There’s more.
“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”
During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:
“Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 15 major bills in 100 days. Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of double-digit unemployment, pushed for sweeping tax cuts week after week. Bill Clinton built an economic ‘war room’ before he even took office, and his team introduced what has now become a political cliché: focusing ‘like a laser beam’ on the economy. Barack Obama instituted a morning economic briefing that put the issue on par with national security. Each practiced the same principle: If you can’t solve the problem fast, at least get caught trying.”
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He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”
Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.
“The president’s most focused message on affordability is that affordability concerns are a hoax. He used that word, or an equivalent, several times on Tuesday, as he has in Oval Office remarks, in a Cabinet meeting, and on social media.”
The “unavoidable truth, no matter how hard you weave,” Dickerson wrote, is that “his argument is weak because he has to overcome people’s lived experience.”
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