The Supreme Court The narrow U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia contributes further to the perceived legal entitlement of faith-based organizations to discriminate while utilizing taxpayer’s money, argues Sruti Swaminathan, staff attorney for Lambda Legal. She contends the recent string of SCOTUS religious liberty holdings shows the need for strong federal, state, and local nondiscrimination protections. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 17, in a narrowly tailored decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia , that a Catholic foster care agency may discriminate against same-sex couples. The court unanimously rejected the invitation to grant government-funded faith-based agencies a license to discriminate. Instead, it decided that a provision in Philadelphia’s contract with Catholic Social Services (CSS) that ostensibly allowed exceptions to city nondiscrimination requirements meant the requirements were not generally applicable. The court also ruled that the “city did not offer a compelling reason why it has an interest in denying Catholic Social Services an exception while having them available to others.” Notably, the court found that the city’s interest in the equal treatment of prospective foster parents and foster children a “weighty one,” but that it did not carry the day under the facts of […]
