Leondra Kruger, potential Biden Supreme Court nominee, stunned justices with position on religious liberty
One of the women on President Biden’s short list to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer once startled the court’s justices with her aggressive position against the plaintiff in a religious liberty case.
Leondra Kruger, now a justice on California’s highest court, argued on behalf of the Obama administration in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, which involved whether religious organizations had to abide by anti-discrimination laws when choosing religious leaders.
“The position that Kruger staked out as a litigant in Hosanna-Tabor against the ministerial exception — one that even Justice Kagan described as ‘amazing’ during oral argument — suggests that she could be hostile to religious liberty if she were appointed,” Judicial Crisis Network president Carrie Severino told Fox News Digital in a Monday statement.
“Given that Hosanna-Tabor was unanimously decided, such a position would shift the Court’s liberal wing even further to the left, which of course is the desire of the liberal dark money groups who spent $1.5 billion in 2020 to help elect President Biden and Senate Democrats,” she continued.
Kruger broadly argued against a doctrine known as the “ministerial exception,” which generally bars the government from intruding into how religious organizations choose their leaders.
The ministerial exception is what protects religious groups’ “freedom to make employment decisions based on their beliefs, including their beliefs on marriage and human sexuality,” for ministerial positions, notes the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group. – READ MORE
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