How the Supreme Court Grasps Religion by Linda Greenhouse
'Before the next two months are out, the Supreme Court will decide two high-visibility cases that at first glance appear to have little to do with each other. One is the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, about the baker who won’t design a cake for celebrating a same-sex marriage, and the other is Trump v. Hawaii, the challenge to the president’s latest travel ban.
One is as domestic as it gets, while the other is infused with issues of foreign policy and presidential power. What they have in common is the claim of religious discrimination at the heart of each. Does Colorado’s public accommodations law, which covers sexual orientation, make the unwilling baker a modern-day Christian martyr for his refusal to create and sell what he regards as his art to celebrate a union that he thinks is unholy? Does a travel ban that applies to citizens of five overwhelmingly Muslim countries, issued by a president who has made abundantly clear his desire to keep Muslims out of the United States, amount to religious discrimination in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause?
I recognize that placing these cases in a religious-discrimination frame obscures their many distinct complexities. The Masterpiece case, at least on the surface, is primarily about free speech; the justices have to grapple with the nature of the baker’s “expression” before they can get to the question of whether being required to bake the wedding cake would unconstitutionally coerce him to express sentiments that violate his religious beliefs. In the travel ban case, the court will surely be attentive to the claims about national security and presidential prerogative that are the administration’s principal defense. Described in this way, the link between the two cases is submerged.
My point here is not to offer a full-dress analysis of the cases, but rather to suggest that the imminent decisions will tell us a lot about how the current court thinks about religion — specifically, how it defines religious discrimination and who it thinks needs the court’s protection.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/opinion/supreme-court-religion.html?
