A former Trump administration official says religious liberty advocates will see a decade of court victories in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling for a Catholic foster care agency.
“This is the beginning of, I think, a sea change in the jurisprudence of the court,” Roger Severino, former director of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health and Human Services, said Monday during a webinar conducted by the Heritage Foundation.
Mr. Severino, now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, noted the high court’s conservative majority and its rulings in favor of religious liberty, especially its unanimous June 17 decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia in which the justices said the city had discriminated against Catholic Social Services by forcing the group to place foster children with same-sex couples.
“With these sets of decisions from the Supreme Court and [with] Fulton being unanimous, I am so encouraged that it’s going to be an unbroken win streak for at least the next 10 years for religious freedom,” Mr. Severino said.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s webinar, titled “Unanimous: Fulton v. Philadelphia and the Future of Religious Freedom,” featured Mr. Severino and two other speakers, including an attorney at the public interest Becket law firm who had argued for the plaintiffs in the Fulton case.
“The Supreme Court justices were able to come together and agree that what Philadelphia did here was wrong, that they should not have excluded Catholic social services from their foster care system,” said Becket senior counsel Lori Widham. “In fact, there are common sense solutions that can allow religious agencies to continue to serve and do their good work, and did not mean that same sex couples and LGBTQ families do not have options within the system. They’ve had those options before and they continue to have them today.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez, a National Review editor and syndicated columnist, said the court also recognized that the Philadelphia matter was not a case centered on sexual orientation or identity.
“The case was not about gay rights,” Ms. Lopez said. “It was about religious liberty. It was about the children and families who Catholic social services served and in every case where You have people trying to pick gay rights against religious liberty. It’s [the] children who are suffering.”
Mr. Severino said the continuing series of complaints against a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding might come to an end as religious liberty gets more support in the courts.
Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, won his case in the Supreme Court in 2018, but he has since become the defendant in a lawsuit for refusing to create a cake for a “transgender reveal” party.
“Just as we saw with Masterpiece Cakeshop, you combine it with [Fulton], it’s an overarching tide [that] is coming in, where no longer are you going to say that people who have religious beliefs about marriage being the union of a man and a woman can be labeled bigots and excluded. … I think he’s going to win when it comes up to the Supreme Court,” Mr. Severino said.
“People of religious faith must be given the space to actually exercise their beliefs,” he said. “That’s what it means to live in a pluralistic society.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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