Abortion and Marriage -- Supreme Court Asked to Take First Amendment Case on Conscience Rights

From Breitbart's Big Government:

Today top religious-liberty scholars and lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that a state law requiring a person of faith to engage in actions that violate his religious conscience violates the First Amendment, in a case with profound implications for the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

In response to a 2007 request by pro-abortion Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire, Washington state officials issued regulations forbidding pro-life pharmacists from declining to provide abortion-causing drugs. Previously, pharmacists who conscientiously objected to abortion could refer customers seeking such drugs to another pharmacy.

The second clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment provides that the government shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Stormans is a small family-owned pharmacy that, along with two pro-life pharmacists, challenged the law on the grounds that it violates this Free Exercise Clause.

Stormans filed suit in federal district court. After five years of litigation and a twelve-day trial, a federal judge ruled that Washington’s regulations violated the First Amendment as applied to people who object to abortion. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, splitting with several other federal appeals courts in the process.
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This case has profound implications. If the High Court sides with the pharmacists, the ruling would also be a basis for Christian bakers, photographers, and florists to decline to participate in same-sex weddings that violate their conscience.

I hope SCOTUS takes the case and find for the plaintiffs. Big Government is intruding in our lives too much.