How Vaccine Fines Could Bankrupt Amish Schools in New York | Aaron Siri
[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]In 2022, New York fined three private Amish schoolhouses $118,000 in combined fines for allowing unvaccinated children to attend. This came after New York repealed its longstanding religious exemptions for school vaccination requirements in 2019.
New York law allows the state to fine a school up to $2,000 per student per day for noncompliance, which could add up to multi-million-dollar fines for a single school year.
In response, the Amish school administrators and parents filed suit against the state, arguing that compulsory vaccination violated their First Amendment rights and the parental right to direct the upbringing and education of children.
Now, Miller v. McDonald is on its second appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In this episode, Aaron Siri, managing partner at Siri & Glimstad LLP, breaks down the profound implications of this case.
“If we can’t protect the Amish, if we can’t protect their religious freedom in the United States of America under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, then,” Siri said, “it really is concerning as to what real reach, almost if any, that right has.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Aaron Siri, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Aaron Siri:
It’s great to be back.
Mr. Jekielek:
Aaron, there’s this case involving the Amish that’s come back to the Supreme Court on a fresh petition that seems to have some really profound implications for us all. Tell me, what’s going on?
Mr. Siri:
What it has to do with at its core is religious freedom.The Amish want to be able to practice their religion in peace in New York. That’s what they want to do. They want to continue engaging in the manner that they have lived for almost 200 years in New York. One of those things is that they send their children to school without receiving certain man-made products. And they’ve been able to do that for about 200 years with no problem.
The state of New York has now told them, hey, Amish. Do you want to stay in this state? You need to abandon your religious beliefs. You need to give these products to these children, to your children, in order to attend school. And if you do not, we are going to levy ruinous fines that will force you to pack your wagons and leave the state of New York. The state of New York has, in fact, levied—and this is at the heart of the case that you’re talking about—over $100,000 on just three Amish schools.
These are small one-room classrooms, and Amish buildings on Amish land with Amish teachers, all paid for by the Amish, over $100,000 in fines. They said to them, okay, we’re going to be lenient the first time we do this. We’re only going to fine you for one day of noncompliance per student. That’s $2,000 per student per day. Not fine you for all the days they were not compliant, which would have been tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. Even over $100,000 is far too much to ask the Amish to pay. The state of New York knows that, and they are intent on having the Amish abandon their beliefs or leave New York. And that’s really what this case is about.
And so the trial court, the federal district court, ruled in favor of New York State and told the Amish, pack your wagons and leave New York. The Second Circuit, which is the federal appellate court that sits above New York, again ruled on the side of New York State and told the Amish, no. We’re not going to respect your religious beliefs. You need to comply, or you effectively need to leave the state.
We went to the U.S. Supreme Court once already. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the lower court and the Second Circuit ruling, threw it out. It protected the Amish. It said, no, we’re going to respect the Amish’s religious beliefs, and told the Second Circuit, why don’t you try again?
In fact, it told the Second Circuit, we recently ruled in a different decision called Mahmoud v. Taylor that involved parents who didn’t want their kids exposed to certain ideologies in public school. That the Supreme Court told them in that Mahmoud case, no, you do need to accommodate these parents. They do have a right to raise their children how they want. And if they don’t want them exposed to those ideologies, they shouldn’t have to. So, hey, Second Circuit, why don’t you really think about what we just ruled in that case where, to some degree, ideologies can change? When you are injecting a product, you can’t undo it. That’s permanent.
The Second Circuit decided to essentially thumb their nose at the Supreme Court and went and reconsidered it, but reached the same conclusion. They said, no, Amish, pack your stuff, get on the wagons, get out of New York. So we’re going back now to the Supreme Court to again ask it to take the case again, to again consider this issue, and to this time rule on it substantively. The last time it was a short order, a very short order that was just vacating it.
I’ll cap it off by saying this, If we can’t protect the Amish, if we can’t protect their religious freedom in the United States of America under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, then that right really is concerning as to what real reach, almost if any, that right really has. The whole idea of the First Amendment, the whole idea of the liberties we have in there is that it restricts government, and not when it’s easy and not when we all agree.
It’s not hard to rule in favor of something that is popular. It’s when it’s not easy. It’s when it is difficult. It’s when not everybody agrees. It’s when it’s even very controversial. That is when the First Amendment rights, religious liberty matters. It’s useless when everybody agrees.
And if we can’t make room in our society, in our freedoms, in our hearts, even if I dare say, to respect the rights of this group to live in peace, to be able to live their life without government interference and their religious convictions, then that right, unfortunately, in my view, is not very meaningful.
Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely fascinating. And maybe can you tell us a little bit more about how you understand the Amish belief system to work and why it’s so important to them that they don’t comply here with this order from New York State?
Mr. Siri:
Well, one of the things that’s core to how they live is that they don’t adopt ever-evolving new technologies that come about. They don’t have electricity in their homes for a reason. They don’t drive cars, and you can go down the list. And one of the things that permits them to do is to allow them to practice their Christian faith in the manner that they have practiced it for hundreds of years without enmeshing themselves in modernity.
In many ways, if you’re not constantly bombarded with social media, with all the things that we have these days, think how much more in tune we could be with ourselves, with our soul. When I think of the Amish, one of the things that is so beautiful to me is that unless you strictly observe the Sabbath, you maybe get one day of this where you just completely disconnect—no telephones, no social media, no televisions, no screens whatsoever. When you’re in that room with your kids and you’re spending time with them, you are really spending time with them. And your kids are probably really spending time with you.
It’s a level of engagement that I think most people don’t experience anymore. They’re really in tune with each other and themselves in a manner that the modern mind, I think, is hard to even conceive of. And so, you know, they have a beautiful way of life. From my experience, they’re incredibly wonderful people who truly just want to do good.
When New York State came after them and issued those fines, they went to the initial hearing by themselves. And when they went there, they wrote a statement. And in that statement, they didn’t put up some big defense; they didn’t make some big arguments. You know what they said?
They said, we are genuinely sorry that we are causing the state of New York any issues. We don’t want to cause any issues. We want to live in peace. This is what our religion provides. And they explained it in the statement. It’s on the federal docket now in the lawsuit we had to bring.I mean, that is the approach that they have. They really want to live in peace and they don’t want to cause any trouble.
And I will tell you, it embarrasses them. It pains them to even be part of this lawsuit. It’s the last thing that they want to do; it really does. But they’re really left with no choice. Their choice was truly to pack their wagons and flee or push back against the state of New York in trying to evict them effectively.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, and the third option, of course, would just be to comply.
Mr. Siri:
They could comply, but as I think they will tell you, they’d rather be judged in the court of man than in the court of God. That when they have to answer to their maker, did they follow their beliefs? Did they engage in things that they believe are truly sinful? And so we place a premium on protecting the body in society as we should.
But we also need to respect people who want to protect their eternal soul. That is meaning, that is value. If all we are is just a sack of carbon, then we’re not going to give any value to the soul, whether one views it as God, whether one views it as an intelligent creator. People come at it from different senses, but humanity has put value in what I will call the soul, and something that is beyond just the simple atoms that comprise each of us as humans.
Mr. Jekielek:
How did you get interested in this case, Aaron?
Mr. Siri:
Number one, I will say that religious liberty is obviously critically important, and it would be my honor, actually, to be able to defend that right and to act as an attorney along with co-counsel. We have a number of other firms involved with this work, doing an incredible job. But, of course, the products at issue are ones that we litigate around.
And so, in some respects, our firm was kind of a natural place to maybe start if they were going to look for attorneys. But I already had a relationship with some of the folks in the Amish community, and so I was maybe a natural segue. With that said, this case is really about religious liberty; it’s not about the products per se.
With that said, at least when I think about the First Amendment rights, I think about what they meant in 1791 when they were ratified by the states. When you think about what the founders meant when they said, enshrine the right to religious liberty in this country, religious liberty back then wasn’t like it is today. It’s not like church on Sunday and a few other things you do, and then everything else is secular. No.
In 1791, people lived their convictions, they lived their religions, so to speak. Their life was about convictions in many respects. This separation of, this is secular and this is religious, wasn’t a thing in the manner it is today.
When the First Amendment enshrined that right to religious liberty, it was the ability to live your convictions. And I think it’s really important, even if some no longer view it that way and some don’t want to have convictions in that manner, for those that do, it’s essential, it’s critical as a nation that we respect those religious freedoms and those liberties.
In fact, in many respects, when you look at what underpins this country, what makes this country so great—I mean, there are a lot of other countries, Jan, that have the exact same constitution as we do in many respects, and have similar laws as we do on the books. Those countries don’t have a lot of freedom, and those countries, though dubbed democracies, don’t work very well; they’re dysfunctional. What’s the difference in many respects between some of them?
There is one difference that does exist for some of them. One of the major differences that you can often find is the values that exist amongst those in the society of that country.And in the United States of America, what many people often dub Judeo-Christian values, really spread in this country by Christians, whether you’re secular and realize it or not, inform so much of the value system that folks in this country have. It’s an underpinning of what makes this country one of the founding pillars that make it great.
America really works well as a country because most Americans want to do good for the sake of doing good. That’s been my experience in this country. Without that, it’s very easy, no matter how good your laws, no matter how good your courts, for things to devolve and descend into what you see in other countries. By the way, I was called racist for this point when I made it at Berkeley when I was in law school, but, you know, that pejorative doesn’t erase reality.
Mr. Jekielek:
I think it’s, why would that be considered racist? I don’t know.
Mr. Siri:
You’d have to get into the minds of people that go to Berkeley. I’ve never really understood it. They told me that it was like white privilege or something. I said, Are you talking to me? I’m darker than all of you. I don’t know what you’re talking about. But anyway, let’s not get into that. The important point is that I never really understood it.
But the important point is that those values, they underpin, whether many people realize it or not, I think a part of what makes this country so great. And having separation of church and state does give us the room here for folks to practice their religion freely and the shared values that I think most Americans have. And I think that it’s worthy to protect those values.
It’s worthy to protect those who want to continue in the tradition of this country of living out their convictions, not only for their own sake, but because they provide an example, they provide a light to others, I believe, right? Not by the sword, not trying to, not by bullying people, not by bad people, but by being examples of goodness, being examples of what’s right. And if there were any community that I wanted to, that I, you said, why would I do this? That I wanted to defend that I think helps provide that light. This is certainly one of them.
And so it’s my honor, it’s my privilege, frankly, to represent them to try and fight for their rights. And I obviously really sincerely hope and pray that the Supreme Court will take this case on again and will again strike down what the Second Circuit has done so that the Amish just continue to live in peace as they’ve done for 200 years and not to yet again have to pack their wagons to flee persecution, which is what they did when they came here.
Why did they come to New York? Why did they come to the U.S.? Precisely because they had to flee once. Here they are. They came here for the promise of freedom. They’ve had it for all this time. And now the state of New York wants to take it away.
Mr. Jekielek:
From what I understand, in most states in America, there are both religious exemptions and medical exemptions for vaccines, because these are the products in question here. And so why can New York State be different here?
Mr. Siri:
They decided to repeal their religious exemption, and 48 states in America had religious exemptions. The only outliers at one point were Mississippi and West Virginia. Mississippi brought a federal lawsuit where the federal judge reinstated the religious exemption. We’re in the middle of a lawsuit in West Virginia. Four states recently decided to repeal their religious exemptions: New York, Connecticut, Maine, and California. Why should they be able to be in this situation? They shouldn’t.
There should not be a state without a religious exemption because, in my view, and I’m hoping the Supreme Court agrees with this, the First Amendment of the Constitution provides protections for those who sincerely held religious beliefs that are contrary to the practices of receiving these products, to not have to, in this instance, basically undo the Amish way of life in order to comply. So it shouldn’t be that way, and we hope the Supreme Court will agree with that.
When it comes to medical exemptions, all 50 states do have a medical exemption. But that’s not really the issue here, first of all. They have religious beliefs contrary to receiving these products, but they also are healthy. Among the families of the kids in these three schools, there are about 168 children. It’s in our court papers. They don’t suffer from any of the chronic diseases that plague American children.
In fact, we provided a declaration from a medical doctor that compared that population of Amish children, explained that there should have been like 15 cases of asthma and a whole host of other medical conditions, and they don’t have any of these. So these kids are healthy, so they don’t have calls for medical exemption.They apparently have been able to do that without the need to violate their religious beliefs. They shouldn’t have to violate their religious belief to, quote, unquote, make themselves healthier.
When you think about these over 160 children who are healthy, if this was about health, New York State should be looking at these kids as models and asking why they are healthier? Why do these approximately 168 Amish children not suffer from the chronic health conditions that are plaguing over 40 per cent, according to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]? Some data reflects even higher levels of children in America today.
And not only do they have chronic health conditions, often multiple, often far more severe, and this is up from under 10 per cent of kids having a chronic health condition in America in the early 80s. What has changed? Maybe they should take a look at this community instead of trying to force upon them the same type of lifestyle that is apparently something about it that has resulted in that increase. Instead of New York State looking at this from that vantage point, they’re just looking to go in and force their views on what will make this Amish community healthier. And if this was really about health, truly about health, then they would first study that.
Then separately, they might begin by addressing the over 90,000 other students who are apparently in schools in the state of New York who aren’t compliant with the vaccine requirements. And they’re not even seeking religious exemptions, as far as we know. Why not start with them? Why start with the tiny, relative to that, Amish community? There are 20,000 Amish, only a small percentage of them are in school.
But yet, that’s who you’re going to go and persecute. That’s who you’re going to go after. I think that the state of New York, you know, it’s like every religion. You always go after the apostates first, you also have those who appear to really, you know, refuse to adopt your beliefs in something. And New York State’s got a certain set of beliefs. Those who are just forgetting or failing to comply or for whatever reason, they’re not like apostates. They’re not going to go and try and persecute them because they don’t feel like they’re refusing.
The Amish, on the other hand, do have genuine, sincerely held religious beliefs contrary to the practices that New York State wants. And so maybe in that respect, they are being targeted. There are members of the legislature who want to repeal the religious exemption, what they called religious beliefs contrary to vaccination, the kind of beliefs the Amish have. They literally called them garbage.
That kind of thinking, unfortunately, not only permeates the members of the legislature who went and repealed the religious exemption in the state of New York to attend school without these products, but also those who are now trying to seek to persecute the Amish in the state of New York.
Mr. Jekielek:
For, I mean, just in general, is it even constitutional to allow for, you know, sort of no religious exemptions for any medical product?
Mr. Siri:
When it comes to these products, if you can make an exception for secular reasons, so during COVID, if you could let Walmart stay open.The Supreme Court held, wait a second, you can let Walmart stay open. You should be able to let the church stay open, right? If there is enough, if it is not such a medical imperative that you have to close everything and you can allow certain things to stay open, then you have to respect religious beliefs as well. If it’s a medical imperative that no unvaccinated kids be in school, then let them start with saying that.
But they don’t say that. They say, we can let unvaccinated kids in school, but we can only do it for a secular reason: a medical exemption. Well, if you can make room for, accommodate secular exemptions, you should be able to accommodate religious exemptions. If you can accommodate folks who want to protect, one for some other secular reason, you should be able to protect those who want to protect their souls, their eternal souls, from damnation.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, this is the legal principle that you made me aware of when we were speaking earlier of strict scrutiny. Just kind of explain how that works.
Mr. Siri:
The simplest way I could say it is this: strict scrutiny is the standard that most fundamental rights are judged by in most contexts. So, if the government wants to infringe on your right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and so forth, it has to show a compelling interest, a compelling state interest. And if it can show that, that it’s infringing in the smallest way possible, the least restrictive means.
That standard, unfortunately, is not, since 1990, under a decision called Oregon v. Smith, been the standard applied to religious freedom in this country. It should be the standard, but it’s not under the Supreme Court jurisprudence since 1990. Along with many others, I think that was a colossal mistake.
In this case, what we have to argue is why the court should get to strict scrutiny and why this law is not neutral and generally applicable. And that is what the Smith decision found. It found that if a law is neutral and generally applicable, you don’t get to strict scrutiny. So in this case with the Amish, we have to prevail in arguing to the Supreme Court that, in fact, this law is not neutral in general, applicable or requiring them to get these products unless it has a religious exemption.
Mr. Jekielek:
Yes, and this is a bit confusing, maybe, because it seems like the Supreme Court already has a pretty clear opinion on this, right? Like they sent it back because they felt the decision was, you know, a problem back to the Second Circuit.
Mr. Siri:
Yes, but when they did that, they did it in a few sentences without really fleshing it out. I think that in some ways they wanted to give the Second Circuit an opportunity to do the right thing, right? And the Second Circuit didn’t. The Supreme Court takes very, very few cases every year. Very, very few. And so if it can avoid deciding an issue,I think that would be reflected by the tiny, tiny percent of cases that seek cert review by the Supreme Court that it takes.
In this instance, this case is specific to the Amish, and I think the Supreme Court wants to protect the Amish, but it is specific to the Amish, this particular case. There are a lot of issues that come before the Supreme Court. Many of them have national implications. It’s only an issue that’s specific to the Amish in New York, so it’s not affecting the whole country at the moment. Maybe it was hoping the Second Circuit would do the right thing for the Amish in New York. Clearly, they haven’t, and the Supreme Court will hopefully take the case and weigh in.
Mr. Jekielek:
Not to beat a dead horse here, but it strikes me that this does have pretty profound implications for other faiths other than the Amish because it would set a kind of precedent, wouldn’t it?
Mr. Siri:
To me, it should just set the precedent that religious liberty in this country should be respected, period.
Mr. Jekielek:
I tend to agree with you here, but if the decision goes in the other direction, it’s setting the opposite precedent, not just for the Amish, right? Like that’s why it strikes me that this is something quite a bit beyond the Amish, isn’t it?
Mr. Siri:
You make a very good point, actually, which is that I’m thinking about it from the prevailing perspective. You’re thinking about it from the perspective of if the Amish lose. If they lose, I agree with you. It has profound, in my view, national repercussions.
I think that you might very well see judges across the country use that as a precedent to say, look, even an injection into the body amongst the Amish, living their lives separate and apart, we don’t have to respect under the First Amendment religious liberty. And so, you know, why should I respect your rights? Why should I grant you an injunction? Why should I, you know, stop the government from infringing on your religious freedoms? You’re absolutely right.
I was thinking about it from the other perspective that if the Supreme Court protects the Amish, this case is brought as an as-applied challenge for the Amish, which means that we’re not seeking to strike down the law in New York for everybody and say everybody has a religious exemption. This case is only seeking to restore religious exemption for the Amish. It’s specific to them; they’re in a specific situation.
And so, in that regard, if the Supreme Court rules for the Amish, it will be an Amish-specific decision, at least as to that particular case. But it is important. And it’s why I was saying that, you know, if religious freedom is important writ large, and to your point, if the Supreme Court doesn’t side with the Amish, it can have very devastating consequences, I think.
I’ll give you a quick example, actually, and it’s this: Before they repealed the religious exemption in New York in the summer of 2019, religious leaders across the state of New York actually lobbied the state of New York to repeal the religious exemption, as incredible as that sounds. And I met with some of these religious leaders, and I said to them, look, if you don’t hold the line at literally piercing the skin, going into the body and injecting foreign matter, and say that somebody can have a religious belief contrary to that practice, and you want to say, no, the government does not need to provide any respect for that religious view, then what religious freedoms do you have left? What rights do you think you’re going to have left?
And sure enough, some of these very same religious leaders were out there pounding the pavement and loudly protesting just a year later when their churches, when their synagogues, were shut down by the government during COVID in 2020 and 2021. Here they were saying, whoa, how can you shut down my religious institution?
In some respects, those very same religious leaders had already ceded their rights to the government. They already said to the government, no, it’s okay. You could take a religious freedom, even when it comes to piercing the body. Think about it in terms of infringement. What’s a greater infringement? That or just closing a building?
Mr. Jekielek:
No, I mean, this is pretty fascinating and important. And I think that, you know, for many of us, we don’t think through the nuances of these decisions. And I suspect these religious leaders likewise hadn’t really thought through the ramifications of those decisions at the time.
Mr. Siri:
Obviously, that’s not true of all religious leaders, to be very clear. There are some incredible religious leaders who will say that all are God’s children, and who will never, and it doesn’t matter what state they’re in, refuse to exclude any child from their school because they’re God’s children and they’re going to raise that child in the faith that God commanded. With that said, the ones that I’m speaking of, yes, maybe you can give them a pass, except that I told them the repercussions, but maybe they needed to hear it from somebody else, not a lawyer.
Mr. Jekielek:
Aaron, tell me just a little bit about your background. I kind of asked you a little, I asked you earlier how you got into this issue specifically, but if you could just tell us a bit about your practice and what you do.
Mr. Siri:
I’m the managing partner of a law firm that’s got around 120 individuals in it. About half the firm does plaintiff-side class action work, a lot of privacy-related work. We sue for data breaches, protect biometric privacy, and genetic privacy. We’ve got the biggest practice in the country that I know of that sues for camera surveillance, like Flock cameras, for example. So we do internet artificial intelligence violations. In any event, we have a massive privacy practice; we do lots of other things in that regard.
The other half of the firm I refer to as kind of the vaccine-related practice, even though it’s a bit of a mix where we do vaccine policy work. That’s the core of what I focus on. And that is about impact litigation. That’s about assuring that everybody in this country, you know, has the freedom to, on the one hand, if you want to get a vaccine every single day and you want to wear a mask and you want to have a self-imposed stay-at-home order, I’ll fight for your right to do that because this is America and that’s freedom.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to receive these products or wear masks on a plane or you name it, that’s freedom too. The government shouldn’t be compelling you to do it. Everybody should be free to do it. Anybody who wants to should wear one mask, two masks, five masks, 10 masks, whatever they want to do. They can wear them from the start of the plane ride to the end of the plane ride, but nobody should be compelled to do so. We bring those cases on an impact basis to what could be most effective.
We challenged a mask mandate on planes during COVID on behalf of 17 members of Congress. Earlier, I mentioned that we fought on behalf of members of the military so they wouldn’t be killed. We did the Air Force and the Army case. You know, we fight to get transparency by getting the FDA [U.S. Food & Drug Administration] to release all of the documents they relied upon to license, for example, COVID-19 vaccine, and so on and so forth. And then we also do a lot of things surrounding that.
We represent people injured by vaccines, but we can’t sue the manufacturer. We bring in something called the Vaccine Compensation Program. We help folks who want to get exemptions to vaccines, including in immigration, so they can immigrate legally without getting vaccinations if they want.
We also represent people who are fired for refusing vaccinations. And our immigration and employment practice also does other things as well. A lot of that, and especially the employment practice, focuses around religious freedoms and violations of employees’ religious rights.
I went to Berkeley for law school. I clerked for a year after that, and then I was working at one of the biggest firms in the country for over five years, representing massive corporate interests, typically on the defense side. And then I opened my own firm. I was doing some of that initially, and then I switched over into doing plaintiff-side work where I sue big companies.
My very first vaccine-related case was actually by a colleague of mine from the old firm I was at, who was representing a nurse that had developed some serious dysautonomic issues after getting an influenza vaccine.And he was going to work at the Department of Justice, which is actually on the other side of vaccine injury cases. Like I mentioned, you can’t sue for vaccine injuries. You bring it in this federal program and against the federal government, and the Department of Justice defends on the other side.
He said, hey, I got this case. Do you want it? Can you take it from me? I can’t keep representing this woman because I’m going to work for the Department of Justice. So I said, sure. That was the very first vaccine injury case that I ever did, or the first vaccine case I believe I ever did.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, how did that work out?
Mr. Siri:
We got our compensation. The Department of Justice is not a rational actor. When you sue most corporations, there are pressure points you can hit. Usually they’re economic, they’re reputational, and you could bring them to settle at what I would call value. With the government, though, in terms of economics, there is no pressure point. They just take more of your money. It’s your money they’re fighting you with, and then they could just take as much as they want to fight you forever, so they don’t care. And then, you know, reputationally, they don’t really care either. So there’s not really much pressure.
So the entire tactic the Department of Justice has in these cases is delay, delay, and just basically to burn out not only the petitioner, but the lawyers that are bringing the case until they finally get the client, unfortunately, to capitulate to something unreasonable, which I believe is typically what happens in this program. To the extent that you even can get compensation, because you don’t get like an Article III judge. You get a special master. There are no rules of discovery.
There’s no real discovery as of right. So you can’t just go depose the company that made the product, get their documents, which you would normally do in a case to prove that it caused the injury. So, in any event, but with that said, yes, we’re able to get her compensation that in this program would be considered appropriate. In a regular court, no.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, as we finish up, Aaron, what’s the timeline on all this?
Mr. Siri:
The briefing on asking the Supreme Court to take the case will go on for a few more months, and then we’ll get a decision, and then hopefully, God willing, the Supreme Court will take this case on to protect the Amish. And then we will have another round of briefing, you know, which will then end with an oral argument. Then eventually we’ll get a ruling from the Supreme Court.
Mr. Jekielek:
Any final thoughts as we finish?
Mr. Siri:
My final thought will be about putting this in an even bigger context of why this case and religious freedom in general is so important. For me, what makes America so great and what really sets it apart from all the forms of government, for the most part, that preceded the founding of this country, is the respect for individual and civil rights. When the founders wrote, we are all endowed with inalienable rights, it was in some respects a Judeo-Christian value, but it was also an incredible thing to use as the premise to found a nation, to found a country, to create a form of government.
It was really saying, look, we’re not going to have a government like all the ones that preceded this, where a king, a dictator, a central bureau is going to decide what’s best for each one of us, we the people. We’re going to decide that. We’re going to create a government with limited rights. It’s not allowed to infringe on our right to what we can say. It’s not allowed to infringe on who we assemble with. It’s not allowed to infringe on what religion we practice. Go down the list. To be sure, that was not perfect when we started.
But we’ve aspired toward that for over 200 years in this country. When I was growing up, this notion of individual and civil rights that we protect even the most despicable speech, so that we can all protect our own speech. We protect the speech of neo-Nazis, not because we like it, we abhor it, because protecting their speech protects all our speech. That was an ethos that I think most Americans appreciated and understood and valued. And it really is what has made this country with that underpinning of values so great.
Unfortunately, we have seen, particularly in the last five to six years, an accelerated move away from that, to this notion of what I call collectivism, where the group needs to cede their rights to the government because the government knows best, whether it’s what you wear on your face or what you inject in your body, or where you’re allowed to go out of your home or not, whether you’re allowed to go get a latte from the corner store in 2021, right?If you want to stay at home in 2020 or 2021 and get a vaccine and wear masks and never leave your house, you’d be free to do that.
But a World War II veteran, who’s got a lot of comorbidities, who wanted to not get a vaccine, not wear a mask, and go to a store and get a latte, and that store wanted to stay open and sell them that latte, should have been free to do it. Because that’s the liberty that individual fought for, and we lost our way a bit.
I hope that this case and the many other cases like it, we can go back to appreciating those liberties, those individual rights and freedoms in the manner that we’ve been doing for so long in this country, and not go in the other direction, which unfortunately some in this country are, I think, working very hard to move us in the direction of.
So I will leave it on that note and maybe add just one other point, which is this.When people think about those rights like religious liberty and freedom of speech and so forth, and they’re trying to do that balancing, what’s a compelling interest? What was that intended? When can we infringe on that? When can the government impinge on that?
Why don’t we start by asking what life was like in 1791 when the First Amendment was ratified? When the First Amendment was ratified, disease and pestilence were rampant. And remember, those rights of religious liberty and free speech were intended to protect us from government overreach in times that were even harder than those.
Think about what it’s like to live in 1791, how hard life was. I think that you really can appreciate the line that was intended that should never be passed when it comes to our right to religious freedom and speech and so forth under the Constitution.
I hope we can get back to that because that line is the line that we’ve held for a long time and it’s beginning to slip. I sure hope it doesn’t slip further. The Amish case truly is one of those, you know, make or break, it’s that crossroad moment, which we’re going to decide which way are we going as a society?
Are we going to respect that light and continue on the path of greatness that has one of the shining principles that made this country great in respecting those rights? Or are we going to go down and devolve into the path where we slowly cede all our rights to some central authority?
How, as well meaning as the government could be, as smart as elected officials might be. But do we really want them making all the decisions for us in terms of how we live life? I think that when we look around the world and we see other countries that have very limited civil and individual rights, we see those outcomes. Maybe not initially, maybe even they’re benevolent dictators.But they always end in the same way at the end.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Aaron Siri, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.
Mr. Siri:
I appreciate spending this time with you. Thank you.
This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.
