Religion Law Quiz #61 (Two distinct protections from the 14th Amendment related to the free exercise of religion)

The Free Exercise Clause applies to the States under the Fourteenth Amendment.  That application provides at least two distinct protections.  What are those two protections? 

 

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Answer: Here's how the Supreme Court answered that question in 2020. 

 

The Free Exercise Clause, which applies to the States under the Fourteenth Amendment, “protects religious observers against unequal treatment” and against “laws that impose special disabilities on the basis of religious status.” Trinity Lutheran, 137 S.Ct., at 2021 (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted); see Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 303, 60 S.Ct. 900, 84 L.Ed. 1213 (1940). Those “basic principle[s]” have long guided this Court. Trinity Lutheran, 137 S.Ct. at 2019–2021. See, e.g., Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, 330 U.S. 1, 16, 67 S.Ct. 504, 91 L.Ed. 711 (1947) (a State “cannot exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Non-believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation”); Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Assn., 485 U.S. 439, 449, 108 S.Ct. 1319, 99 L.Ed.2d 534 (1988) (the Free Exercise Clause protects against laws that “penalize religious activity by denying any person an equal share of the rights, benefits, and privileges enjoyed by other citizens”).

 

Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 140 S.Ct. 2246, 2254-55 (2020).

 

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