Should Courts Assess the Sincerity of Religious Beliefs?
It was no surprise back in March when the Supreme Court ruled that Texas had to oblige a death-row inmate’s wish for the company of a pastor who would pray with him and touch him as the lethal cocktail dripped into his veins. Such execution-chamber companionship was “part of my faith,” the inmate claimed, and if anything could penetrate the Court’s wall of indifference toward the death penalty, it figured to be religion. The vote was 8–1.
But there was in fact something unexpected about the decision in Ramirez v. Collier: The lone dissenter was Clarence Thomas. Furthermore, Justice Thomas got it right.
Although I don’t often find myself in agreement with Justice Thomas, I have been hoping for a dissenting opinion like his as I’ve watched the Supreme Court’s majority nurture an expanding theocracy that seems to have no stopping point. Justice Thomas is usually an avid part of that majority. This time, however, he ventured where I can’t remember any other justice, liberal or conservative, having the nerve to go: He questioned a religious claimant’s sincerity. His colleagues had granted relief, he complained, “for a demonstrably abusive and insincere claim filed by a prisoner with an established history of seeking unjustified delay.”
[Adam Serwer: Conservative justices suddenly discover the limits of religious liberty]
Why did Justice Thomas, of all people, jump off the theocratic bus? Perhaps he was just reacting to the facts of
