Many of the religious liberty cases that come before the Supreme Court concern relatively trivial matters. Richard Garnett, a professor of law and associate dean at the University of Notre Dame, reports on a case that actually matters:
The Supreme Court’s religious-freedom decisions are usually about symbols, speech and spending: war memorial crosses in the desert and Ten Commandments monuments near public buildings, scholarships that allow poor kids to attend parochial schools and funding for “faith-based” social services, Pledge of Allegiance, and so on.In late March, the justices agreed to review a Michigan job-discrimination case with none of these familiar eye-catching and attention-grabbing features. It does involve, however, fundamental questions about church-state relations and the limits of government authority — questions at the core of the First
Amendment’s concerns — and it could prove to be among the court’s most important religious-liberty cases in many years.
