With that in mind, this is a great story about brewing contretemps between the Attorney General of Florida, James Uthmeier, and the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops over the subject of vaccine mandates in schools. Florida law requires that private schools in the state's voucher program to allow parents to religiously exempt their children from school vaccine mandates. As an expression of their own religious commitments, however, Florida's Catholic schools do not want to permit such an exemption, as part of its pursuit of the "common good" and ensuring that its schools are safe havens for the elderly and children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.
In a fit of extraordinary arrogance, Uthmeier (who is himself Catholic) simply asserted that the bishops had "no legitimate religious reason" for denying vaccine exemptions. When the bishops replied that it was not for a state official to tell the Catholic Church what its religious commitments are, Uthmeier whined that vaccine mandates would represent a "completely new teaching." There were a lot of theological/antisemitic reasons why I felt Jews would be especially vulnerable to this sort of authenticity-policing, but it is striking to see that even the Catholic Church can have the authenticity of its religious views questioned when it speaks in a more liberal voice.
Uthmeier also questioned "whether a private school that doesn’t follow state laws protecting parental rights and deeply held beliefs should still be permitted to participate in state programs and receive state funding." This is, indeed, the million-dollar question that will arise again and again now that the Supreme Court has detonated historical barriers between church and state in allowing (and in many cases compelling) state funding of religious schools (and this very controversy illuminates why government "entanglement" with religion was historically seen as such a threat to religious liberty).
Of course, the question Uthmeier raises is not intrinsically partisan -- in other cases, the variant will be a religious school that wants to discriminate against LGBTQ kids in defiance of state laws requiring equal treatment. But this situation represents a particularly weak case for denying a religious exemption to the church, since the entire premise of the Florida law is about protecting rights of conscience. It can't hold that out as a paramount interest and then withdraw it for religious claimants who express the "wrong" view.
Nonetheless, resolving these cases will be inherently messy, which leaves a lot of room for bias, which leaves ample opportunity for religious and political favoritism. So my baseline prediction remains that conservative adjudicators will grant the exemptions when it favors conservative beliefs (you can discriminate against the gay kids), and will not when it doesn't (you can't have a vaccine mandate). Either the Supreme Court didn't intend for that sort of religious preferentialism to be the consequence of its new free exercise jurisprudence -- or it did.
