Noteworthy News

[Angrboda]

What’s the specific legal dispute in Catholic Charities?

Wisconsin, like every other state, taxes employers to fund benefits for workers who lose their jobs. Like most states, Wisconsin’s law includes an exemption for church-run nonprofits that are “operated primarily for religious purposes.” According to the state’s highest court, this exemption only applies to nonprofits that primarily engage in religious activities such as holding worship services, and not to charities that provide secular services like feeding poor people or caring for people with disabilities — even if these secular services are motivated by the charity’s faith.

Catholic Charities, meanwhile, provides these kinds of secular services and does not proselytize its faith to the people it serves. Significantly, the Catholic Church chooses to operate Catholic Charities as a separate corporation that is distinct from the greater church itself, even though the charitable arm is controlled by church officials.

This decision to separately incorporate Catholic Charities provides considerable benefits to the greater church. Most notably, it means that, if Catholic Charities is successfully sued, that lawsuit cannot touch the broader church’s assets. But the church’s decision to make Catholic Charities a separate corporate entity means that this entity is not exempt from the state’s unemployment law — because Catholic Charities itself only provides secular services.

Catholic Charities claims that this arrangement is unconstitutional, and that it should be allowed to benefit both from separate incorporation and from the state’s exemption for organizations “operated primarily for religious purposes.”

Though its lawyers offered three different reasons to rule in their favor, several of the justices suggested that the simplest and most straightforward way to rule in the church’s favor would be to conclude that Wisconsin unconstitutionally discriminates against religious sects that engage in charitable work without proselytizing or otherwise engaging in the kind of religious activity that triggers Wisconsin’s exemption.

Indeed, many of the justices pounced on a disastrous concession by Colin Roth, the lawyer defending Wisconsin’s regime before the Court. Justice Samuel Alito asked Roth what is the bare minimum Catholic Charities would need to do in order to secure an exemption, and Roth said that a charity which runs a soup kitchen would be exempt if it requires hungry people to say the Lord’s Prayer before they receive soup, but not if it runs an identical soup kitchen without this requirement.

But such a distinction, Kagan warned, discriminates against the Catholic Church specifically because its religious beliefs require it to do charitable works without demanding that the beneficiaries of those works participate in Catholicism. “I thought it was pretty fundamental that we don’t treat some religions better than other religions,” Kagan said.

Without the Obama-appointed Kagan’s vote, it’s hard to imagine how Wisconsin can win this case. And all six of the Court’s Republicans appeared to share Kagan’s concern.

https://www.vox.com/scotus/406464/suprem...n-religion