And in a second ruling that also strikes a blow for religious liberty, the Supreme Court again ruled 7-2 (Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissenting) that religious schools should be free from discrimination lawsuits if they don’t hire people for ministerial positions whose lifestyles conflict with their religious beliefs.

Read the details of both cases at the link. Religious schools were already supposed to be protected from these lawsuits, but again, litigants are searching for ways around those protections and liberal judges in places like California are only too willing to help them do that. This ruling expands that protection to cover less ministerial positions and more types of discrimination lawsuits to help head off all the various ways in which people were trying to use the law to force religious schools to hire people who contradict their beliefs and teachings.

As this article points out, the decision will raise controversy because opponents claim it allows religious organizations to discriminate against employees who are not in fully ministerial positions, such as math teachers. But the alternative is to allow the government to decide which positions in a religious institution qualify as “ministerial,” and that doesn't sound like a job that the government should be doing at all. It sounds instead like a perfect example of what the Founders were banning when they wrote that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

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