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The conservative Supreme Court justice thought jurors who were dismissed for their antigay religious beliefs were treated unfairly.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s most conservative members, finds it regrettable that potential jurors in a lesbian’s discrimination case were dismissed for their homophobic religious beliefs.
Alito joined the court majority in declining to hear an appeal of the matter by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, because the case “is complicated by a state-law procedural issue,” he wrote in an order issued Tuesday. “But I write because I am concerned that the lower court’s reasoning may spread and may be a foretaste of things to come,” he added.
Jean Finney had sued her employer, the Missouri Department of Corrections, alleging discrimination because she is a masculine-presenting lesbian and retaliation over a relationship. During jury selection, Finney’s lawyer asked if any of the potential jurors went to a conservative Christian church where it’s taught that homosexuality is a sin and that gay people don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else. Two of the would-be jurors said they did consider it a sin, although they said they supported equal rights for all. The lawyer moved to have them taken off the case. The trial court judge agreed, and the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed this.
“The state ultimately lost the case, prompting its lawyers to seek a new trial based on the jury selection process,” NBC News reports. “The Missouri Court of Appeals ruled against the state, and the Missouri Supreme Court declined to hear the case, prompting Bailey to turn to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
While agreeing that the procedural issue would keep the high court from taking the case, Alito expressed concern about discrimination against people with anti-LGBTQ+ religious beliefs. “The court below reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is a lesbian,” he wrote. “That holding exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in [the marriage equality decision] Obergefell v. Hodges … namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”
“When a court, a quintessential state actor, finds that a person is ineligible to serve on a jury because of his or her religious beliefs, that decision implicates fundamental rights,” the justice continued. He would have favored taking the case “were it not for the fact that the Court of Appeals concluded that the Department of Corrections did not properly preserve an objection to dismissal of the two potential jurors,” he wrote. So he “reluctantly” agreed to reject it.
Alito had dissented from the Obergefell ruling and has gone on to say he’d like to see it overturned. In another example of his ideology, he wrote the 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and its national guarantee of abortion rights.
