What is the role of the court in religious liberty? | Mark Rienzi | Constitutional Conversations

0:00 can you describe how Becket goes about its work and as you do that perhaps give us a sense for the role of the court what what it does do and kind of where the limits of that reach might be sure so what the Becket fund does is we argue in favor of religious liberty for people

0:20 of all faiths so we’ve had Muslim clients and Jewish clients and Christian clients and everything else you could possibly imagine and we look for cases that will help the supreme court to make good precedent on religious liberty when the Supreme Court is interpreting what does the First Amendment mean what freedoms does it give everybody to live out their lives we want to present good

0:42 cases to the justices so that they can reach the right results in ways that let the First Amendment do the work it’s supposed to do of allowing a bunch of different people of different beliefs and ideas to live together in peace and harmony so for example we represent the Little Sisters of the Poor these are these are Catholic nuns who feel like they can’t buy contraception and drugs

1:03 that would cause early abortions for people we brought their case to the Supreme Court several times the Supreme Court has always protected them when it comes and from our point of view it’s very important to say look people can have all sorts of different beliefs about all kinds of controversial issues but it ought to be clear that the government can achieve its goals without the forced involvement of Catholic nuns

1:24 in something like that so just finding cases that will clearly demonstrate the importance of giving people the freedom to live out their lives if the little sisters weren’t allowed to act according to their faith yeah you know these are these are nuns who take care of the elderly poor so poor people who have no place else to go they come to little sister’s homes and the sisters take care

1:44 of them like family and take and care for them and love them until they die all right wonderful wonderful ministry if the sisters were not allowed to live out their Catholic faith in that way where are those people gonna go and who’s gonna take care of them and so finding cases that will demonstrate to the justices and demonstrate to society the importance of allowing people to have that freedom and what we would lose

2:05 if we take away that freedom I think that’s a core piece of what we do