Tag: religious freedom

New York Fines Amish Schools After Ending Religious Exemptions from Vaccination

New York has fined three Amish schools a total of $118,000 for enrolling unvaccinated children. According to the Second Circuit opinion, the commissioner of health fined Dygert Road School $52,000; Twin Mountain School, also known as Pleasant View, $46,000; and Shady Lane School $20,000. The schools serve Amish settlements in Clymer, Heuvelton, and near Canajoharie. New York has approximately 25,000 Amish residents, the fifth-largest Amish population of any state.

Under New York Public Health Law § 2164, children attending public, private, or parochial schools for more than 14 days must be vaccinated against specified diseases unless they qualify for a medical exemption. Each violation carries a fine of up to $2,000, and the Department of Health counts each day an unvaccinated student attends school as a separate violation.

For Dygert Road and Twin Mountain, the department assessed $2,000 per unvaccinated student, counting one day of noncompliance for each. Shady Lane provided no student records, so the department calculated its fine based on one student attending for 10 days. The commissioner described the totals as “principled and conservative under the circumstances.”

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Is Banning a Church From Building on Its Property’s Just “A Mere Inconvenience”? The Supreme Court Will Decide

The Supreme Court just agreed to take up a case that could reshape how every church in America is treated when it tries to build. Last week, the Court granted certiorari in Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist v. Frederic to define what counts as a “substantial burden” on religious exercise under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).

A Catholic religious organization in Park Hills, Kentucky, wanted to build a small chapel on land next to its church. The construction would be about the size of a backyard swimming pool. The city’s board approved the permit, but neighbors sued, and the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the church.

The court’s reasoning was alarming. It said that being barred from building a chapel was “a mere inconvenience” because the church could build a smaller one somewhere else. It also called the burden self-imposed because the church knew about the ordinance before it applied.

Under that logic, a complete ban on a religious use of your own property isn’t a substantial burden as long as a judge thinks you could worship some other way. Judges, not believers, would decide what matters to the faith.

The ACLJ filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take this case. We told the Justices that lower courts have been eroding RLUIPA’s protections by adding qualifiers Congress never wrote. Congress passed this law to stop local governments from treating churches as second-class property owners, and it told courts to read the statute in favor of broad protection of religious exercise.

The grant confirms that RLUIPA’s land-use protections have gone too long without guidance from the Supreme Court. Now that the Court has taken the case, the ACLJ will file an amicus brief on the merits, standing with houses of worship across the country as the Justices decide this question.

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DHS Chief Markwayne Mullin Goes Off on the ‘Prophet’ Muhammad, Issues Warning About Islam

DHS Chief Markwayne Mullin went off on the ‘Prophet’ Muhammad and issued a warning about “extreme Islam” as he launched an attack on Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. To say they are non-existent anymore doesn’t even resonate with those of us that are in law enforcement…” Mullin said.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is still an organization that wants to harm the United States. They have made that very clear and when they have someone that is associated with it, you gotta question their conviction…” Mullin said.

Mullin said Islam permits Muslims to lie.

“This is affiliated to the Prophet Muhammad. When it’s permissible to lie, it says there’s three reasons that it’s permissible,” Mullin said.

“One is in a time or war, one is in a time of conflict, to try to reconcile, and one is when you’re trying to persuade your wife essentially to stay with you,” he said.

“And you go okay, where does other religions say it’s permissible to lie? So you can’t compare that. Extreme Islam is dangerous,” Mullin said during an appearance on Fox News.

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33 Leaders Demand Mosque Moratorium in Texas and Florida: Investigate ‘Critical Infrastructure of Jihad’

On 19 October 2026, Governors Greg Abbott (Texas) and Ron DeSantis (Florida) received an open letter from 33 leaders of patriotic organizations calling for investigations into mosques associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and other sharia supremacism networks and for the imposition of temporary moratoriums on the approval and construction of new mosques in their respective states.

The letter from the BanSharia.com Coalition thanks the Governors for designating the Muslim Brotherhood and its US arm, CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), as terrorist organizations. Abbott made the declaration in November 2025, describing both as a foreign terrorist organization and a transnational criminal organization, and restricting property acquisition in the process. DeSantis made his move in December 2025 with an executive order directing state agencies to deny benefits or resources to anyone who provides material support. CAIR has, of course, brought federal lawsuits in response to both designations, seeking temporary injunctions.

The signatories maintain that the designations must be enforced and that the groups’ activities must cease in Texas and Florida. They point to a “critical infrastructure of jihad” comprising the facilities which the Brotherhood refers to as Islamic societies or Islamic centers (in practice these are mosques). The U.S. total is estimated to be at least 3,150. CAIR co-founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad has put the number at 4,000. The letter goes on to state that new facilities are still being approved and built every month, particularly in Texas and Florida, which are the focus of a campaign of ” stealthy civilization jihad “.

That phrase is in the Muslim Brotherhood’s 1991 ‘Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Objective of the Group in North America’ by Mohamed Akram (a leading Brotherhood figure at the time and still is). The document was admitted as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial on terrorism financing. It states: “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization Jihadist process’ with all the means. The Muslim Brotherhood must realize that their work in America is a kind of great Jihad in the annihilation and destruction of Western civilization from within and in the ‘sabotage’ of its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is wiped out. The religion of Allah is established over all other religions.”

The memo on the role of the mosques is entitled “Understanding the role and the nature of work of ‘the Islamic Center’ in every city with what achieves the goal of the process of settlement”. It states: “To the extent that we own and control these centers at the continental level, we can say that we are progressing successfully in the settlement of Dawa in this country. That is to say that the role of the ‘Center’ is the same as that of the ‘Mosque’ in the time of the Prophet (S) when he was marching to ‘settle’ Dawa in its first generation in Medina.” This is interpreted as equating the role of the mosques that are under the control of the organization with those of the mosques in the days of the Prophet, i.e., they are to be used for the storage of arms and for the training and planning of jihad.

A steadily increasing number of public statements by imams, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s front groups and sharia supremacists in politics all point to seditious intent. The letter asks whether public safety and national security may in fact be compromised by some, or indeed all, of the mosques in America and that this possibility must be investigated with the utmost urgency.

While Texas and Florida conduct their own investigations, the signatories say they could impose moratoriums on approving and constructing any further mosques. They argue that federal constitutional and statutory schemes can implement such moratoria despite the very strong state interests at stake. The letter calls on the governors to carry out threat assessments of the Islamic community, Islamic centers and other mosques and to, in the course of those assessments, prevent any further expansion of that infrastructure.

Of the 33 signatories: Rep. Keith Self (R-TX); Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William “Jerry” Boykin, Executive VP of the Family Research Council; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, founder of the AHA Foundation; Frank Gaffney, President of the Institute for the American Future; Anne Schlafly, Chair of the Eagle Forum; Kimberly Fletcher, founder and president of Moms for America; me as founder and Director of Hearts of Oak. Others include leaders from the Texas Eagle Forum, Grassroots America (We the People PAC), the American Family Association, and several organizations focused on national security and constitutional issues.

The letter goes on to state that the Governors previously designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as having both the authority and the duty to assess the facilities in question and to prevent any further expansion of those facilities during the assessments. No fixed timescale is suggested beyond the timescale required for the assessments.

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WA School District That Forced Kids to Hide Bibles in “Concealed Envelopes” Must Now Apologize, Undergo Religious Liberty Training, and Fork Over $275K

A school district in Washington state is being forced to apologize, fork over $275,000, and attend religious liberty training after forcing students to hide Bibles in concealed envelopes.

School officials in the Everett School District were accused of trying to make it difficult for children to participate in a release-time program on Christianity. The elementary students were forced to hide Bibles in “concealed envelopes,” and parents were forced to repeatedly submit permission slips.

LifeWise Academy provides optional, privately funded Bible education to public school students during school hours. Classes take place off school property and require parental permission.

Following complaints, First Liberty Institute and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP filed a lawsuit on behalf of a LifeWise parent and staff member after the district imposed restrictions that singled out the program.

According to the lawsuit, the restrictions included excluding LifeWise from community events and flyer displays, requiring burdensome weekly parental reauthorization, and requiring students to keep materials received at LifeWise, including Bibles, sealed in envelopes in their backpacks.

Additionally, a school board member was openly hostile about the program and “publicly declared animus toward LifeWise Academy” while grossly mischaracterizing the program during  a school board meeting.

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Federal Court Rules Against Amish Families in Religious Exemption Case — Will Supreme Court Have the Last Word?

A federal court last week ruled against a group of Amish parents who sought religious exemptions from school vaccination requirements for their children — a ruling that legal experts suggest may lead to a U.S. Supreme Court showdown that could determine the future of religious exemptions nationwide.

In its ruling in Miller v. McDonald, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said New York State’s law eliminating religious exemptions from school vaccination requirements is “neutral and generally applicable,” doesn’t discriminate against specific religious practices and furthers the state’s interest in protecting the public from disease.

The plaintiffs, a group of parents and representatives of Amish schools in New York, sued New York’s Department of Health and Department of Education in 2023, alleging the state’s law barring religious exemptions violates the U.S. Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause under the First and 14th Amendments.

The parents face $118,000 in fines for noncompliance with the state’s vaccination requirements.

Last week’s decision was the second time the 2nd Circuit ruled against the plaintiffs. The same court previously dismissed the suit in 2024, upholding a decision by another federal court earlier that year.

In December 2025, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the 2nd Circuit, asking it to review constitutional questions arising out of a separate ruling, Mahmoud v. Taylor, in 2024. In that case, the Supreme Court found that parents have the right to request an exemption for their children from LGBTQ curriculum on religious grounds.

According to The Washington Post, last week’s ruling in Miller v. McDonald may “set the stage for a potential Supreme Court battle over vaccine mandates,” citing legal experts who suggested the court is likely to accept the case for review on constitutional grounds and in light of the Mahmoud v. Taylor decision.

Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University professor of health law and an outspoken vaccine proponent, told the Post he expects the Supreme Court to “reverse the appellate court’s decision” if it chooses to review the case.

A review could result in a ruling that would “allow religious vaccine exemptions nationwide,” the Post reported.

The Post reported last month that the Supreme Court has signaled that it “may be open to a constitutional claim based on the lack of a religious exemption for vaccine mandates in New York.”

A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Amish plaintiffs would be “the anti-vaccine movement’s biggest win,” the Post wrote.

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The Last Nurse Standing

There are court cases that arrive dressed as employment disputes but carry the weight of an era. Adams et al. v. Mass General Brigham is one of them.

On paper, it is a federal discrimination case in Boston involving three remaining plaintiffs, Tyler Adams, Michelle Orfanos, and Jamie Steverman, against Mass General Brigham, the most powerful hospital system in Massachusetts. In reality, it is a post-pandemic reckoning over institutional power, religious liberty, scientific certainty, workplace coercion, and who gets to write the official history of the mandate years.

Mass General Brigham is not some minor regional employer. It is the largest private employer in Massachusetts, a Harvard-affiliated medical empire with tens of thousands of employees and annual revenue measured in the tens of billions. Its own public materials describe the system as having 82,000 employees and $23 billion in annual revenue, while its CEO profile states that Anne Klibanski leads an 85,000-employee system with $22 billion in revenue and $2.7 billion in annual research funding.

In June 2021, MGB announced that all 80,000 employees would be required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine once the FDA granted approval to one of the vaccines. “The evidence of COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness is overwhelming,” Klibanski said in the announcement. Employees, MGB stated, would be able to request medical and religious exemptions.

That promise, that exemptions existed, is where the story begins.

More than 2,400 employees sought exemptions. MGB granted only 234. In a 2023 federal order, Judge F. Dennis Saylor wrote that MGB had “effectively made a determination that some level of risk, eventually involving 234 unvaccinated individuals out of approximately 93,600 employees… was tolerable.”

For the plaintiffs, that fact is not incidental. It is central. Their argument is not that MGB granted no exemptions. Their argument is that MGB granted some exemptions while allegedly denying others through a secretive, discriminatory, and uneven process that favored certain religions and disfavored others.

The most vivid remaining face of that fight is Michelle Orfanos, a registered nurse who had worked for MGB since 2012. According to her state-court complaint, Orfanos worked throughout the pandemic unvaccinated, including as a homecare nurse and as a volunteer in the Boston COVID field hospital. She says she had received religious exemptions to flu vaccines for years, only to have her COVID religious exemption denied in 2021, resulting in her termination.

Then came the second firing.

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NY Times Says Christian MLB Players Wearing Bible Verses Will Cause Mass ‘Abuse’ Of Gay People

During a Friday pride night game, several San Francisco Giants pitchers wrote Bible verses on their gay-ified hats. One player made clear there was “no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for, and what I stand on: I believe in God.” The same player added that the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant and promise and that he’s ultimately thankful to live in a country where free expression and speech are protected.

But apparently writing a Bible verse on his baseball cap will actually cause gay people to be abused and even incite gays to kill themselves — so says The New York Times’ subsidiary, The Athletic.

Grant Brisbee said the Bible verse inscriptions on the hat were “tone-deaf” and “made the night about ‘us versus them.’”

Brisbee then made the fantastical claim that, apparently, writing a Bible verse on your ball cap will cause gay people to suffer actual harm.

“Without the support of their community at large, LGBTQIA+ individuals are much more likely to be told that they are without value,” Brisbee wrote. “They are likelier to be abused, to self-harm, to get kicked out of their homes, to be bullied, to be assaulted. They are at risk because of a society that still doesn’t always accept them, even after decades of progress.”

There is legitimately zero evidence that baseball players writing Bible inscriptions on their hats will cause any harm, abuse, or the assault of gay persons (or anyone for that matter).

What Brisbee is arguing is that if a player expresses religious beliefs that diverge from the left-wing LGBTQ orthodoxy, then real people could be harmed. At that point the argument is that Christianity causes violence and therefore Christianity is bad unless of course you practice your faith in a way that Brisbee deems fit (he waxes poetic about how the right type of Christianity apparently demands affirming the sexual preferences of others). His argument also becomes: if fans don’t enthusiastically celebrate pride night, they’re contributing to suffering. If someone doesn’t affirm the mental illness of a man thinking he’s a woman, they’re creating a dangerous environment.

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Washington Legal Settlement Protects Christian Foster Parents

The widespread cultural divide among Americans was evident in a recent First Amendment case in Washington. A Christian foster family from the Evergreen State said their speech and religious liberties were violated by state policies demanding they employ gender pronouns and affirm the sexual orientation of their foster charges. The resulting settlement seeks to protect religious liberties while also supporting the self-identification of gender, orientation, etc., by minors in need of an affirming home.

Brave Foster Plaintiffs

Shane and Jennifer DeGross are devout Christians who served as licensed foster parents in Washington from 2013 to 2022, caring for four children. The onslaught of trans ideology and a world in which toddlers allegedly proclaim their “true” gender yielded regulations in Washington and many other states that required foster parents to agree that they would “affirm” a child’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression (called “SOGIE”), regardless of whether a particular child actually articulated any such desires. That is, the laws are imposed “just in case” a child decides to transition or declare themself gay, bi, trans, etc.

The DeGrosses told the truth to state employees: They could not agree to such restrictions because they believe that “a person’s biological sex is an immutable characteristic” and that “as image bearers of God, a person should live consistent with their God-given sex rather than contrary to God’s design.” The state of Washington then denied them a license, later issuing a limited license, which the couple still found hostile to their faith.

The DeGrosses brought suit in federal court with the assistance of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), alleging the state had violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion and expression. The state sought to dismiss the complaint, alleging the plaintiffs had no legitimate cause of action. Ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, the court stated:

“….Policy § 1520 restricts certain speech by prospective parents on the topic of SOGIE, while requiring speech that aligns with the state’s perspective…. In essence, the Department has forced the DeGrosses to choose between forfeiting their freedom of speech to obtain an unrestricted license, or upholding their beliefs surrounding SOGIE, and receiving a less-favorable license subject to certain restrictions. The DeGrosses have carried their burden to show that the Department’s enforcement of Policy § 1520 plausibly constitutes impermissible viewpoint discrimination.”

Freedom of Religion Endures

The US Constitution is designed to prevent government intrusion into citizens’ subjective beliefs, particularly regarding religious or political views. State foster care services place agencies in the midst of the culture war created by novel theories about mutable gender, infinite pronouns, and endless prideful celebration of sexual behaviors. Some parents may wish to encourage such thinking and behaviors in very young children; some (including conservative Christians) are inclined otherwise. In seeking to split this proverbial baby in half for foster parenting, the court noted: “The situation would be no different if the state had restricted parental speech favoring more ‘progressive’ views of sexuality and gender identify, while compelling speech along the lines of [the DeGrosses’] more traditional understanding.” [citation omitted.]

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Pentagon Cuts the Faith-Code Maze From 200-Plus to 31

The Pentagon just cut its list of religious affiliation codes for service members from over 200 down to 31. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the reform in March as part of a broader effort to refocus the Chaplain Corps.

Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata later released the memo making the change official. The old system had sprawled into a giant administrative junk drawer, stuffed with codes many troops never used and chaplains didn’t need to serve the force. From Just the News:

Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata released the memo, stating the change will “streamline the DoW collection of religious preferences for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy,” according to Military.com.

“The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” Tata said. 

Hegseth said the previous system had grown to “well over 200 faith codes,” called it “impractical and unusable,” and noted many codes were never used at all. He also said 82% of religious service members use only six of the codes. From Religion News Service:

Hegseth has been explicit about his Christian faith. He worships at a church run by a self-described Christian nationalist and has held Christian worship services at the Pentagon. He has pushed social media messages that mix war preparations with Bible verses as well as official statements that champion a disputed, faith-focused version of U.S. history.

In 2017, during the first Trump administration, when the military expanded the number of recognized religious faiths it said it was doing so to provide “more accurate demographic data for religious groups,” to enable “better planning for religious support to the force” and to provide “a better assessment of the capabilities and requirements of each Military Service’s Chaplain Corps.”

The reform renames the old “faith and belief coding system” as “religious affiliation codes” and returns the list to a simpler purpose: providing chaplains clear information so they can support troops in line with their stated faith background and practice.

The new list keeps broad religious categories that cover the faith service members report most often. The list includes Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, agnostics, and major Christian groups such as Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and others.

The dropped codes include atheism, Asatru, Eckankar, New Age churches, paganism, spiritualism, Troth, Unitarian Universalism, and several Wiccan groups.

It’s time to cue the usual panic choir, warming up somewhere between “theocracy” and “how dare the database stop flattering my boutique label.”

There’s an argument that the change could make smaller faith groups less visible in the military system, where Hegseth’s chaplain reforms are part of a wider Christian emphasis at the Pentagon.

Those concerns deserve a hearing, but the policy doesn’t ban any service member from worshipping, seeking accommodation, speaking with a chaplain, or holding any belief.

A code list isn’t the First Amendment.

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