Religious liberty does not mean much if it disappears the moment Albany decides compliance is more convenient
By James Lacey
There are moments when a government dispute stops being about the regulation itself and becomes a much larger test of what kind of society we intend to be. New York's escalating confrontation with Amish families over childhood vaccination requirements has reached that point. According to reporting published this week by the New York Post, members of New York's roughly 25,000-person Amish community are considering leaving the state rather than violate sincerely held religious beliefs, while several small Amish schools have accumulated substantial fines for refusing to enforce New York's immunization requirements. Three schools involved in the federal lawsuit Miller v. McDonald reportedly face approximately $118,000 in combined penalties.
As a New Yorker, I find the possibility that an entire religious community could conclude that it can no longer live peacefully in this state deeply disturbing. The question before us is not whether vaccines have value. They do, and New York has a legitimate responsibility to protect public health. The harder question is whether that legitimate authority is effectively unlimited, or whether there remains a point at which the constitutional rights of families, parents and religious communities require the state to accommodate people who live differently from the majority. I stand with the Amish on that question.
New York allowed religious exemptions from its school vaccination requirements for more than half a century. That changed in June 2019, amid a major measles outbreak centered heavily in communities with low vaccination rates. The Legislature repealed the religious exemption while retaining a medical exemption, and the current law applies to children attending public, private and parochial schools. The state's position therefore has a substantial public-health history behind it, and that history deserves to be acknowledged rather than caricatured. But acknowledging the state's interest is not the same thing as conceding that the state must prevail in every circumstance.
That distinction matters enormously in the Amish case. These are not parents demanding that New York eliminate its vaccination program for everyone. They are not seeking to dictate what another family does with its children. The plaintiffs include members of Old Order Amish communities and small Amish schools established specifically to educate Amish children within their own religious communities. Their lawsuit alleges that vaccination conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs and that forcing their schools to require vaccination places them in an impossible position, violate their faith or abandon the institutions through which that faith and way of life are transmitted to their children. The Second Circuit's June 30, 2026 opinion confirms that the plaintiffs include three Amish community schools and Amish parents and representatives challenging the application of Public Health Law §2164 to them. That should sound familiar to anyone who understands the history of religious liberty in America, because the Amish have been here before.
In 1972, the United States Supreme Court decided Wisconsin v. Yoder. Wisconsin attempted to require Amish parents to send their children to school until age sixteen. The Amish maintained that compulsory high-school attendance conflicted fundamentally with their religion and their method of preparing children for Amish adulthood. The Supreme Court concluded that, under those circumstances, Wisconsin's interest in compulsory education did not outweigh the Amish parents' First Amendment rights.
The significance of Yoder is not that religious believers automatically defeat every generally applicable law. They do not. The significance is that the Constitution requires government to take religious exercise seriously. The state cannot simply identify an important policy objective, announce that everyone must comply in precisely the same manner, and declare the constitutional inquiry finished.
That principle became particularly important again last year in Mahmoud v. Taylor. In that case, the Supreme Court held that parents challenging a Maryland school district's refusal to provide religious opt-outs from certain elementary-school instruction were entitled to preliminary relief. The Court relied heavily upon Yoder and reaffirmed the constitutional importance of parents directing the religious upbringing of their children. That decision directly affected the Amish litigation in New York.
The Supreme Court had already received Miller v. McDonald. On December 8, 2025, the Court granted the Amish plaintiffs' petition, vacated the Second Circuit's previous judgment and sent the case back for reconsideration in light of Mahmoud. The Second Circuit reconsidered the matter and, on June 30, 2026, again upheld New York's law as applied to the plaintiffs. Attorneys representing the Amish have since announced that they intend to return to the Supreme Court. So, contrary to some shorthand descriptions of the dispute, the Supreme Court has not yet issued a final merits ruling declaring New York's vaccination law unconstitutional. What it has already done, however, is significant: it ordered the lower court to reconsider this precise religious-liberty controversy after one of the most important recent Supreme Court decisions concerning parental religious rights. The constitutional issue deserves serious examination.
New York retains medical exemptions. If a qualifying medical determination establishes that vaccination may be detrimental to a child's health, the state can accommodate that child. Yet after 2019, there is no corresponding exemption for a parent whose sincere religious beliefs prohibit the same act. The Amish petition previously presented that distinction directly to the Supreme Court, arguing that New York permits certain secular exceptions while categorically rejecting religious ones.
Whether that distinction ultimately violates the Free Exercise Clause is for the courts to decide. But as a matter of public policy, New Yorkers do not need to wait for nine justices in Washington to recognize how extraordinary the present situation has become.
We are talking about families who have maintained one of the most distinctive religious cultures in the United States for generations. Amish communities deliberately structure their lives around separation from many elements of modern society. Their schools are not simply miniature versions of ordinary public schools. Education, work, family, worship and community life are interconnected parts of their religious existence. American law has recognized that reality for more than fifty years.
If the consequence of New York's policy is that Amish families believe they must move to Pennsylvania or another state simply to remain faithful to their convictions, Albany should regard that as a policy failure, not a victory.
There must also be proportionality in government enforcement. According to current reporting, the three Amish schools involved in Miller have accumulated roughly $118,000 in fines. These are not multinational corporations absorbing another regulatory expense. They are small religious schools serving isolated communities. Financial penalties at that scale can become something more than enforcement. They can become coercion.
The state will respond, with reason, that communicable diseases do not recognize religious boundaries. An unvaccinated population can experience outbreaks, and vaccination requirements have historically been among the tools governments use to reduce that risk. New York's health authorities continue to defend vaccination requirements as part of their responsibility to protect children and communities. That argument deserves an answer rather than dismissal. The answer is accommodation.
Government routinely manages competing constitutional rights, medical circumstances and public-safety concerns through narrowly tailored rules. An Amish religious exemption need not mean abandoning disease surveillance, reporting requirements, temporary exclusion during documented outbreaks, quarantine authority when legally justified, or other targeted measures addressing an actual public-health danger. There is an enormous policy space between "New York has no authority whatsoever to protect public health" and "every Amish child must comply regardless of religious belief or the family must leave." A serious government should be capable of occupying that space.
Indeed, forty-six states and the District of Columbia were identified in the Amish petition as permitting religious exemptions when the case reached the Supreme Court in 2025. New York therefore cannot reasonably claim that recognizing religious accommodation is some unimaginable experiment in governance. Other jurisdictions have spent decades balancing vaccination policy and religious liberty without concluding that one must completely extinguish the other.
This is also why the issue should transcend partisan politics. Religious freedom cannot depend upon whether we personally share the religion demanding protection. The First Amendment protects Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Amish believers, atheists and people whose convictions may seem strange to almost everyone else. Constitutional rights matter most precisely when the majority does not live the same way. If we defend religious liberty only when the belief being protected resembles our own, we are not defending religious liberty. We are defending popularity.
There is something especially troubling about forcing this confrontation upon the Amish. These are communities historically known not for demanding that society conform to them, but for asking society to permit them to live apart from much of it. They maintain their own churches, schools, farms, businesses and intensely local communities. They seek comparatively little cultural influence over everyone outside those communities. When people who have spent generations attempting to avoid political conflict finally conclude that litigation or relocation may be their only remaining options, government officials should ask themselves how the dispute reached that point.
New York does not become stronger by driving the Amish into another state. It does not become more tolerant by making religious conformity the price of remaining here. And it does not demonstrate confidence in government by responding to peaceful dissent with escalating fines until families finally surrender their convictions or leave.
Albany should stop treating accommodation as capitulation. The Legislature should restore a carefully structured religious exemption, or at minimum create a specific accommodation capable of protecting sincere Amish religious practice while preserving proportionate public-health safeguards. The state should also reconsider punitive fines against the small schools caught in this litigation while the fundamental constitutional question remains contested. If Albany refuses, then Miller v. McDonald deserves another hearing before the United States Supreme Court.
More than fifty years ago, the Supreme Court confronted another collision between the regulatory power of a state and the religious life of the Amish. In Yoder, the Court understood something government frequently forgets: uniformity is not the same thing as liberty. New York would do well to remember it.
The Amish should not have to choose between their faith and their home. And if New York has reached the point where peaceful families must cross the state line simply to preserve a centuries-old religious way of life, then the problem is no longer merely a vaccine mandate. It is a failure of government to understand the limits of its own power.