Quotes About Exemptions

It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.

There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.

The federal government is partly at fault for the many state exemptions permitting the medical neglect of children. From 1974 to 1983, the states were required to enact such exemptions to qualify for federal funding related to children.109 This federal law was the result of Christian Scientists in positions of power in the Nixon Administration.

For example, it is commonplace for the states to impose mandatory reporting requirements on professionals who have regular contact with children and suspect abuse. An obvious category would be clergy. The Catholic Church's bishops, however, invested in lobbying to obtain exemptions for clergy so that they would not have to report child abuse (knowing as it did that many of its priests were in fact abusing children).

I will endorse the Supreme Court's unfairly maligned opinion in Employment Div. v. Smith, and I will argue that there is no constitutional right to harm others simply because the conduct is religiously motivated. The Court's First Amendment doctrine is wise. Legislatures can exempt the religious from some laws, but only where legislators and prosecutors ask the hard questions and where the religious entities have borne the burden of proving that exempting them renders significant harm.

Three legal regimes make it possible for religious entities to run child-care centers without having to abide by the usual state licensing requirements. First, some states have exempted religious child-care centers from their licensing system altogether. For example, Missouri exempts "[a]ny child-care facility maintained or operated under the exclusive control of a religious organization[,]" so long as the facility receives no state or federal funding.

The vaccination problem highlights how religious exemptions can spur claims for nonreligious exemptions, and a breakdown in the purposes of the law in the first place. Parents who unfortunately bought into the autism hype around vaccinations and saw that religious parents were obtaining exemptions demanded the same for themselves.

In truth, there is no constitutional right to immunization exemptions. If the unvaccinated numbers continue to grow, states will legitimately have to consider whether even the religious exemption is safe public policy.

And if Congress can't delegate the legislative power that the Constitution gives it, it certainly cannot delegate power that the Constitution doesn't give it, such as the power to hand out selective exemptions from its laws, as agencies do when they grant waivers.35