This is John Batchel, conversation with my colleague, Professor Richard Epstein of the Civitas Institute.

About nine to nothing decisions by the Supreme Court just handed down.

The one here we look at is Catholic Charities Bureau Incorporated

and whether or not it needed to pay federal taxes on the basis

of it being a secular organization, so said the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and not a religious

organization. Richard, I asked, I ask Richard, is this a surprise? And he answers bluntly.

Here's Richard Epstein on a 9-0 decision by the Supreme Court in favor of Catholic Charities Bureau Incorporated. More of this later

tonight. Oh, I'm not surprised at this because I think the recent trend in all the cases where

there have been decision have always supported these religious organizations to the extent that they're making

claims for liberty rather than demanding some kind of a government subsidy. And I think the decision

is absolutely correct. You do not want to be sitting around telling somebody how it is that they

ought to run their internal institutions.

These are Catholic charities, and they take all their Catholic doctrine very seriously.

And that's all you need to do in order to my mind to establish the exemption.

You recall there was a decision several years in New York State to tell the Yeshiva University that it had to allow clubs for gay orientation as

memberships in its organization. And they said, well, you have to do that if you do everybody

else, a kind of a bogus equal protection claim. I actually submitted, or in my name, a brief

was written, saying this is a terrible decision. And so what happened is they thought,

oh, they're just bluffing if they're going to have to let these guys, and they'll do it so they

can keep everything else going. And no, what they did is they shut down all courts, because they took it

that seriously. And the most dangerous thing that you can do when people have religious beliefs is to have some secular organization decide to weigh something about their severity and about their intensity.

So I'm not surprised at all.

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