Interesting that Roberts assigned the two opinions to the two who are most liberal / progressive.

It was a pretty easy call, IMO, and should have been ended at a lower court. One can easily argue that the mission of the Catholic Church is in fact charity. It not to recruit new members, send members on missions, preach on street corners, and all that. Pretty strange to have argued that charitable work was not a "religious purpose."

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Wisconsin violated the Constitution when it refused to give a Catholic social ministry group the same exemption from the state’s unemployment tax that it gives to churches, religious schools, and some other religious groups. In a unanimous opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the justices agreed with the Catholic social ministry group that the denial of the exemption constituted religious discrimination. “It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain ‘neutrality between religion and religion,’” Sotomayor emphasized. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule,” she wrote, “but this is not one” of them.

The dispute began nearly a decade ago when the Catholic Charities Bureau for the diocese of Superior, in the northwestern part of Wisconsin, sought an exemption from having to pay the state’s unemployment tax for its employees. Because the group conducts its charity work to put Catholic principles into operation, it contended, it fell within a provision of the tax law that carves out from the definition of “employment” anyone who works for an organization “operated primarily for religious purposes.”

A state labor commission rejected the group’s bid for the exemption, concluding that even if its motivations were religious, the charity work itself was secular.

I skimmed the subject lines of the politics thread on the other board. They don't seem to talk about stuff like this instead of mostly Trump. Constitutional rights are pretty interesting, right?