Supreme Court unanimously shoots down Obama admin: churches have right to choose ministers
Image via WikipediaWASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Christian advocates are celebrating following a Supreme Court ruling Wednesday unanimously supporting the right of a church to select its own ministers, known as the “ministerial exception,” denying the Obama administration’s argument that no such protection actually existed.
Under the First Amendment, the high court ruled, churches are entitled to protection for their employment practices that applies beyond the head of a religious congregation to others, such as teachers, who are viewed as also carrying the message of the church. The court thus dismissed a wrongful termination suit brought against a church by a former teacher, who complained of disability discrimination to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Conservative analysts note that Obama administration lawyers went farther than anti-religion interest groups weighing in on the case: Ed Whelan of National Review said the administration “dramatically raise[d] the stakes” by suggesting that Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church’s specific decision was not only not protected under the ministerial exception, but claiming no such exception exists to begin with.”
But Chief Justice John Roberts stated in the case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC that, “By requiring the Church to accept a minister it did not want, such an order would have plainly violated the Church’s freedom under the Religion Clauses to select its own ministers.”
Roberts also said that to award compensation such as back pay “would operate as a penalty on the Church for terminating an unwanted minister, and would be no less prohibited by the First Amendment than an order overturning the termination.”
The exception is not intended to grant churches cover for firing ministers over religious reasons, wrote the judge, but to ensure that “the authority to select and control who will minister to the faithful – a matter ‘strictly ecclesiastical,’ is the church’s alone.” The Court rejected the government’s extreme argument that there should be no such ministerial exception, stating: “We cannot accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.”
Mathew Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel, said the ruling was a victory against the administration’s antagonism towards religion. “The government’s extreme view that churches have no right to control who will communicate their message would allow the government to control churches. It makes no sense to tie the hands of a church when the messenger is undermining the message,” said Staver.
Matthew J. Franck at First Things noted that “there may be a straw in the wind” in the ruling regarding the administration’s attempts to force religious groups to pay for drugs repugnant to their moral code, including abortifacient birth control. The religious exemption for the mandate is so narrow, as many have pointed out, that even Jesus’ own ministry would not have qualified, for it applies only to groups serving and employing mainly members of its own sect.
“It is as though the Obama administration is staffed by people who have never encountered the ministry to the world that is so common among religious folk—especially but not uniquely among Christians,” wrote Franck.
