Comments on Groff v. DeJoy

I have a short piece up at Law and Liberty today (Happy Fourth!), "Refreshing Unity on Religious Liberty", about the Court's recent religious-accommodations case.  Here's a bit:

The high-profile Supreme Court decisions announced each year in late June tend to reinforce a narrative—one that, to be clear, is false—that the Court’s justices are merely partisan actors and that all significant cases divide them into strictly political camps. The term-closing rulings on racial preferences in college admissions, the president’s move to cancel many student-loan obligations, and the free-speech rights of a Colorado website designer fit the press’s favored “liberals versus conservatives” narrative, but most of the Court’s decisions do not. And, significantly, neither did this year’s most important religious-freedom case, which was decided unanimously. . . . 

To be sure, there have been plenty of religious-freedom cases that have divided the justices and, certainly, there will be more. (Should there be exemptions for religious objectors from vaccine requirements? From public-health-related restrictions on gatherings? From abortion regulations? Stay tuned.) Still, it is important for commentators and citizens alike to remember that religious freedom is, and has long been, notwithstanding our divisions and disagreements, at the heart of the American experiment. We disagree today, as we did at the Founding and as we have ever since, over what, precisely, our Constitution’s promise of religious liberty under and through law means, but we know that the promise matters. . . .