By The Epoch Times | Created at 2025-03-30 11:22:48 | Updated at 2025-04-01 11:45:48
2 days ago
The court is taking on cases involving a potential religious charter school and Wisconsin denying an unemployment tax exemption to Catholic Charities.
The Supreme Court is hearing two cases in the coming months that question whether the government can refuse to back religious entities or deny them exemptions under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
In one case, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, the court is reviewing whether the state wrongly denied a Catholic school admission into its charter school program. Another, Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, involves a charity’s challenge to the state’s decision not to exempt it from an unemployment benefits law.
Both cases touch on the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment, which together read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The Catholic Charities case, which is set for oral argument on March 31, questions whether the state of Wisconsin violated the First Amendment by refusing to grant the organization a tax exemption for unemployment benefits.
The dispute centers on the constitution but also the Federal Unemployment Tax Act, which exempts organizations from paying unemployment tax if they are operated primarily for religious purposes. At the state level, Wisconsin enacted a similar law with a similarly worded exemption.
‘Entanglement’
Last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Catholic Charities, stating that it was not operated primarily for religious purposes and therefore didn’t qualify for the usual religious tax exemption under state law. It added that the refusal of the tax exemption by the state did not violate the First Amendment.
According to Catholic Charities, the state supreme court’s decision violated the group’s First Amendment rights by entangling courts in religious questions, discriminating among religious groups, and intruding on church autonomy. They said the state was “second-guessing a church’s answers to religious questions—including what constitutes religious activity.” Its charitable activities are an extension of its Catholic beliefs, the group said.
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President Donald Trump’s administration backed Catholic Charities in February, stating that the state supreme court decision conflicted with the First Amendment. It similarly said the decision “wrongly invites government officials to question whether a particular expression of faith is sufficiently ‘religious.’”
In November, the Wisconsin Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court not to take up the case and argued that the Wisconsin Supreme Court didn’t discriminate or intrude on church autonomy. It also said the state supreme court didn’t overstep its authority by inquiring about Catholic Charities’ beliefs.
The First Amendment, the state said, did not bar all entanglements between church and state but that those entanglements shouldn’t be “excessive”— specifically through continual surveillance of religious organizations.
“Wisconsin’s exemption complies with these principles,” it said in a February brief. “It requires a one-time examination, not continuing surveillance, of [Catholic Charities’] activities to tailor the accommodation to its disentangling purpose: keeping the state out of employment decisions that turn on distinctively religious conduct.”
Religious Charter Schools
The other case—Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond—is set for oral argument on April 30 and could help set the course for the future of charter schools in the country.
St. Isidore of Seville Virtual School, an online Catholic school, applied to be the first religious charter school in the nation and was approved by the Charter School Board. However, a legal challenge arose from the state’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, leading to an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling against the school and order that the Board rescind its contract with St. Isidore.
In a June 2024 decision, the state supreme court held that the contract violated a section of the state constitution that reads: “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.”
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond during an interview in Oklahoma City on Feb. 1, 2023. He has urged the Supreme Court to reject St. Isidore of Seville Virtual School's challenge to a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo
Describing St. Isidore as an “instrument of the Catholic Church,” the court said that “the expenditure of state funds for St. Isidore’s operations constitutes the use of state funds for the benefit and support of the Catholic church.”
St. Isidore and the Charter School Board are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. Drummond, meanwhile, told the Supreme Court that the lower court decision correctly determined that charter schools are public schools and require a strictly secular education.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Jim Campbell, who is representing the organizations, told The Epoch Times: “What we’re hoping is they'll say that religious organizations can’t be treated worse than other groups just because they’re religious.”
Potential Supreme Court Rulings
In both cases, the Supreme Court is considering how religious organizations’ activities impact their relationship with the states. The eventual decisions come amid other religious cases that both Campbell and Becket Fund attorney Colten Stanberry, whose organization is representing Catholic Charities, say support their causes.
Stanberry said recent decisions had “kind of reiterated … that when the government provides a general—generally available benefit—you can’t discriminate against religious comers who are asking for that benefit, based on their religious status.” He added the court seemed to be thinking “religion doesn’t have to be in the background” of a pluralistic society and that religious people should be entitled to the same benefits as others.
Both he and Campbell pointed to the 2017 decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, which held that the state of Missouri violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment by denying it “an otherwise available public benefit on account of its religious status.”
Two other cases in 2020 and 2022 similarly saw the court holding that state policies violated the First Amendment by discriminating against religious entities. Most recently, the court’s 2022 decision in Carson v. Makin held that Maine’s tuition “generally available” assistance program for secondary schools violated the First Amendment by including a requirement that recipients be “nonsectarian.”
Both Drummond and Wisconsin have disputed the idea that their actions were similar to the ones struck down in that case. That case and the 2020 case—Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue—“concerned state subsidization of tuition at existing private religious schools, not state establishment of new public religious schools,” Drummond said, adding that St. Isidore should be considered a public school.
Wisconsin also told the Supreme Court that its unemployment program didn’t favor secular entities like Maine’s program did in Carson v. Makin.
“It presents the opposite scenario from the secular-favoring treatment in Carson … Wisconsin offers organizations that operate for religious purposes an exemption that comparable secular organizations cannot obtain.”
