Court OK’s N.Y. Repeal of Religious Exemptions from Vaccination Requirement
An excerpt from the Second Circuit’s long (and, I think, generally correct) decision yesterday in Miller v. McDonald (Judges José Cabranes, Richard Wesley, and Eunice Lee):
In 2019, New York repealed the religious beliefs exemption to its school immunization law. The law now applies to all students attending public, private, or parochial schools, except those who qualify for the law’s medical exemption. Two parents of Amish students, three Amish “community schools,” and an elected representative of all Amish schools in New York sued New York officials … claiming that the school immunization law infringes on their free exercise rights ….
New York maintained [health and religious] exemptions until 2019. During 2018 and 2019, the United States experienced the worst measles outbreak in over twenty-five years; New York was the epicenter. Most cases occurred in communities with clusters of unvaccinated individuals. Following that outbreak, the legislature repealed the religious beliefs exemption while retaining the medical exemption….
A neutral and generally applicable law’s burden on religion is constitutional if the law passes the relatively low hurdle of rational basis review—that the state has chosen a means for addressing a legitimate government interest rationally related to achieving that goal. If a law is not neutral or generally applicable, however, the government must demonstrate that the law satisfies strict scrutiny, which requires the law “to further ‘interests of the highest order’ by means ‘narrowly tailored in pursuit of those interests.'”
As the Supreme Court explained in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), requiring all laws that burden religion to satisfy the demands of strict scrutiny “would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind,” including “compulsory vaccination laws.” “[A]dopting such a system would be courting anarchy.” … This Court has repeatedly upheld neutral and generally applicable immunization laws in the face of free exercise challenges.
Plaintiffs contend that § 2164’s text and the statements of several legislators reveal a discriminatory motive…. A state “fails to act neutrally when it proceeds in a manner intolerant of religious beliefs or restricts practices because of their religious nature.” … New York Public Health Law § 2164 is neutral on its face. It does not target or affirmatively prohibit religious practices. The law simply applies New York’s school immunization requirements to all schoolchildren who do not qualify for the law’s medical exemption. Moreover, the act of repealing the religious exemption did not “in and of itself transmute” this otherwise neutral law into one “that targets religious beliefs.”
Nor does the legislative history reveal an anti-religious bias. Plaintiffs argue that statements made by a small number of legislators, some of whom sponsored the amendments in their respective houses, evidence religious animus. But Plaintiffs have not alleged facts to suggest tha
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