Last week, a ruling out of the Seventh Circuit presented the latest example that this country is facing an increasingly theocratic judiciary seeking to expressly favor religion and religious citizens at the great expense of nonbelievers. To be clear, the case is only at the preliminary injunction stage, so the Seventh Circuit panel was not making a decision on the merits. However, where the panel did make legal conclusions, they were downright alarming. For example, Judge Diane Wood declared that the court is convinced “that the speech that accompanies religious exercise has a privileged position under the First Amendment.” If your alarm bells went off at the mention of a “privileged position” within the First Amendment just wait, because somehow this opinion gets even worse: We conclude by explaining that a comparison between ordinary speech (including political speech, which all agree lies at the core of the First Amendment) and the speech aspect of religious activity reveals something more than an “apples to apples” matching. What we see instead is “speech” being compared to “speech plus,” where the “plus” is the protection that the First Amendment guarantees to religious exercise. Declaring that religious expression is entitled to some special, […]
