The Supreme Court has been urged to take up a case challenging the elimination of religious exemptions to school vaccine mandates in Connecticut.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, signed a law in April 2021 that repealed religious exemptions to school vaccination requirements. Medical exemptions remained in effect.
The law was quickly challenged in court over allegations that it violated the constitutional rights of parents and children.
Both of those rulings were wrong, the Supreme Court was told.
“The court accepted without question Connecticut’s assertion of a general interest in protecting the ‘health and safety of the students,’” lawyers for We the Patriots wrote in their petition, referring to the appeals court.
The appeals court claimed in its recent ruling that medical exemptions were different because they would enable a small number of students to avoid harms from vaccines, therefore “allowing students for whom vaccination is medically contraindicated to avoid vaccination while requiring students with religious objections to be vaccinated does, in both instances, advance the state’s interest in promoting health and safety.”
Several other appeals courts have also allowed mandates that bar religious exemptions and keep medical exemptions, but the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ruled this year that plaintiffs challenging a Maine mandate with those parameters plausibly pled that the mandate “treats comparable secular and religious activity dissimilarly without adequate justification.”
The Supreme Court should intervene to resolve the circuit split on the matter of a state’s interest in imposing vaccine mandates without religious exemptions, the petition states.
“This case presents the question cleanly,” the lawyers for the petitioners said. “It does not require the court to address the question in the rushed setting of emergency injunctive relief or the complicating presence of nuanced factual disputes. Instead, it asks the court to decide, in the context of a motion to dismiss, whether the lower courts correctly resolved the legal questions presented.”
The Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided on whether to take up the case.
“If we are victorious, the decision could restore religious freedom not only for families in Connecticut, but in other states where it’s been lost, including California, New York, and Maine,” Brian Festa, an attorney for We the Patriots, said in a statement.
Three mothers, a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim, are also part of the litigation.
Earlier Rulings
In her 2022 ruling, Judge Arterton said that mandatory vaccination for school enrollment didn’t violate the U.S. Constitution’s free exercise clause. She also said there were no violations of the Constitution’s equal protection clause.The Connecticut law “does not target religion,” the judge said. “Instead, the law requires all students to receive common vaccinations, exempting those with medical exemptions and those in grades kindergarten through twelve with existing religious exemptions.”
In August, a panel of the 2nd Circuit largely upheld Judge Arterton’s ruling, finding that the state was acting to protect children’s health and safety.
“Not only does the absence of a religious exemption decrease the risk that unvaccinated students will acquire a vaccine-preventable disease by lowering the number of unvaccinated peers they will encounter at school, but the medical exemption also allows the small proportion of students who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons to avoid the harms that taking a particular vaccine would inflict on them,” U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote for the majority.
U.S. Circuit Judge Joseph Bianco, appointed under President Donald Trump, said that the majority’s approach would make it impossible for similar challenges to survive motions to dismiss in the future.
“Such an approach allows the fundamental right of the free exercise of religion to be swept away under the mantle of rational basis review without any meaningful factual inquiry as to whether the differing treatment between the secular exemption and the religious exemption is warranted, even where a religious exemption has existed under the laws of a state for decades,” he added.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, said the decision was “a full and resounding affirmation of the constitutionality and legality of Connecticut’s vaccine requirements.”
“We will continue to vigorously defend our state’s strong and necessary public health laws,” he said.
