On May 24, 2000, the Supreme Court of Ohio handed down a ruling in which it adopted the position taken by The Becket Fund in a friend of the court brief filed on June 12, 1999. Our news release contains additional detail.
The case is about accommodation of a prison guard's religious practices and the broader question of how much protection one's beliefs should receive. Since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated most protection to be free from "neutral and generally applicable laws" under the federal Constitution in its 1990 Employment Division v. Smith holding, and forbade Congress to provide such protection in City of Boerne v. Flores, proponents of free exercise are now looking to state constitutions and legislation to fill the void.
In our friend of the court brief filed on June 12, 1999 we argued that the text and history of the Ohio Constitution's conscience clause (Section 7, Article I), which reads:
All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience. No person shall be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or maintain any form of worship, against his consent; and no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society; nor shall any interference with the rights of conscience be permitted. No religious test shall be required, as a qualification for office, nor shall any person be incompetent to be a witness on account of his religious belief; but nothing herein shall be construed to dispense with oaths and affirmations. Religion, morality, and knowledge, however, being essential to good government, it shall be the duty of the general assembly to pass suitable laws to protect every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship, and to encourage schools and the means of instruction.
should be read broadly as providing more protection for religious exercise than the current U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation of the federal Free Exercise clause. The state language, which reads that "All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship . . ." more explicitly provides for an individual right to be free from government interference than the federal language "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]." Furthermore, the history of the State, since its adoption of these principles at the time of the Northwest Ordinance and its first constitution in 1802, indicate that its constitution should have force independent of the federal free exercise clause.
The Ohio Supreme Court agreed, holding that "the Ohio Constitution's free exercise protection is broader, and we therefore vary from the federal test . . . We apply a different standard to a different constitutional protection."