Characterizing their argument one way on a web page, and another way in court doesn’t strike a sour note?
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No, not at all. Each are geared to specific audiences and purposes, using the appropriate language register.
I get that there should be language differences; one geared to the courtroom, the other to the man-on-the-street. What there should NOT be is differences of substance such that reading the summary and reading the court documents would present the reader with two different arguments. The summary should be a layman’s language synopsis of the seminal argument being made before the court; not substantively variant pablum crafted for easy digestion by the American Idle.
The Constitutional argument that they enjoy protection under the Free Exercise Clause is the strongest appeal to legal authority they have, here. Why assert that argument before the courts, but present something weaker to the public mind? That makes no sense.
That is why I construed their summary as their core argument before the courts; it is why I would not have expected their court case to be centered upon anything different than what they presented in their summary. And what they presented in their summary, seems a weaker argument than the one I presented.
The Free Exercise Clause is strong enough to protect religious people from being drafted into the military, and that during wartime; it is certainly strong enough to protect religious people from being forced to pay for others’ morally debatable — AND, I might add, entirely OPTIONAL — acts. The interest of the State in compelling able-bodied men to serve in combat at an hour of dire national need does not trump the individual’s free exercise of his religious faith. Against the towering stature of that national need, which has been made to bow down before the Free Exercise Clause of The Constitution, how does the State’s argument in this case even begin to register? Does the flea outweigh the pachyderm?
How absurd!
Since a man cannot be compelled to go to war for this nation if acts of war are repugnant to his faith, neither can a man can be compelled to pay for others’ access to health services if the acts proceeding from such access are repugnant to his faith. As The State has seen its claim of compelling interest struck down in the former case, ever so much more must it also be struck down in the latter.
I pray to God that is the argument they are making, but their summary scarcely hints as much.