Plug-In: Roe falls, plus the Supreme Court's four other biggest religion cases of 2022

It happened.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

The Associated Press’ Mark Sherman reported:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has ended constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place nearly 50 years in a decision by its conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade. Friday’s outcome is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
The decision, unthinkable just a few years ago, was the culmination of decades of efforts by abortion opponents, made possible by an emboldened right side of the court that has been fortified by three appointees of former President Donald Trump.
The ruling came more than a month after the stunning leak of a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito indicating the court was prepared to take this momentous step.

Read the full opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

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I haven’t always paid close attention to the Supreme Court. But lately I do.

On days the nation’s high court releases new opinions, I vow find myself refreshing — again and again — the justices’ home page.

The court’s five biggest religion cases of 2022 have piqued my interest. The Dobbs decision, highlighted above, was not specifically about religion. But religious voices on both sides are a major part of the debate.

Here is where the other four religion cases stand:

Don't neglect the Supreme Court's potentially weighty case on religious schools funding

Media eyes are trained on the U.S. Supreme Court's December 1 argument on Mississippi's abortion restrictions, preceded by a fast-tracked November 1 hearing about the stricter law in Texas. But don't neglect the Court's December 8 hearing and subsequent decision on tax funding of religious schools in the potentially weighty Carson v. Makin case (docket #20-1088).

University of Baltimore law Professor Kimberly Wehle certainly wants us to pay heed, warning October 14 via TheAtlantic.com that this is a "sleeper" appeal that "threatens the separation of church and state." In her view, the high court faces not just the perennial problem of public funding for religious campuses. She believes the justices could decide "religious freedom supersedes the public good" by aiding conservative Christian schools that, based on centuries of doctrine, discriminate against non-Christian and LGBTQ students and teachers.

Journalistic backgrounding: Thinly-populated Maine provides an unusual context for this story because the majority of its 260 school districts do not operate full K-12 systems and instead pay tuition for public or private schools that families choose for upper grades. Religiously-affiliated schools are included, but not if Maine deems them "sectarian."

Notably, the parents' plea for tuition is backed by major institutions of the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical Protestants, the Church of God in Christ (the nation's largest African-American denomination), Latter-day Saints (formerly called "Mormons") and Orthodox Judaism, alongside the 63-campus Council of Islamic Schools. A reporter's question: Has such a religious coalition ever formed in any prior Supreme Court case?

Of further interest, the case engages a major religious-liberty theorist, Michael W. McConnell, director of Stanford University's Constitutional Law Center and former federal judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. He wrote that circuit's 2008 opinion in Colorado Christian University v Weaver (.pdf here), which tossed out a law that barred "pervasively sectarian" colleges from a state scholarship program.

In Carson, McConnell filed a personal brief September 8 that hands the Supreme Court a history lesson (.pdf here) on religious freedom as conceived when the Constitution's First Amendment was framed. He has explored this ground since a significant Harvard Law Review article in 1989.