Supreme Court will decide: Is Catholic Social Services exempt from anti-discrimination laws?

 

The flood of amicus briefs continues to mount in Fulton and Catholic Social Services v. Philadelphia.  The Supreme Court agreed in February to review the decision of the Third Circuit that Philadelphia was not obligated to contract with Catholic Social Services for adoption services. CSS refuses as a matter of religious doctrine to refer any child for adoption or foster care to an unmarried couple.  It does not recognize as married same sex couples. 

CSS is driven by its embrace of the Catholic Catechism which holds that homosexuals are "intrinsically disordered".  And so it would be scandalous by this logic for CSS to refer a child to the care of a same sex couple, a view repudiated by many such as Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, a married gay man and father of three.

The Supreme Court has agreed to answer this question as posed by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents CSS.

Whether a government violates the First Amendment by conditioning a religious agency's ability to participate in the foster care system on taking actions and making statements that directly contradict the agency's religious beliefs? 

The City's foster care and adoption needs are served by thirty agencies all of which agree to abide by local anti-discrimination law.  In the Supreme Court some three dozen amicus briefs have been filed.  Many argue that anti-discrimination laws of general application provide important protections to LGBT children and afford children the opportunity for stable homes.

The State of Massachusetts, joined by 31 states and the District of Columbia, argues as friends of the court that "the First Amendment does not require governments to use contractors which refuse to provide contracted services on a non-discriminatory basis."

Catholic Social Services, represented by the conservative Becket Fund for religious Liberty embraces Chief Justice John Roberts's dissent in the same-sex marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).  Roberts, a conservative Catholic, there lamented that “[t]hese apparent assaults on the character of fair minded people will have an effect, in society and in court,” and it would be a mistake “to portray everyone who does not share the majority’s ‘better informed understanding’ as bigoted.” 135 S. Ct. at 2626.  The court should therefore revisit, CSS and the Becket Fund argue, the principle that a religious organization's right to contract for public services can be conditioned on general principles of civil law.