In the very state where Religious freedom was born. New York’s power brokers have turned the Amish into a target. After Cuomo stripped the religious exemption in 2019 and Hochul kept the boot on, Albany fined three tiny, privately funded one room schools a combined $118,000 for teaching their own children without the state’s 24 to 27 shot schedule. Those schools take no public money. The state still allows medical exemptions and leaves teachers unvaccinated, yet it treats Amish conscience as a billable offense. This is the same pattern that once hauled Amish families into court over eighth grade schooling until Wisconsin v. Yoder stopped the state from conscripting their kids. Health officials have long mislabeled Amish caution as “religious refusal,” then used outbreaks elsewhere as the excuse to punish a people who asked only to be left alone.
UPDATE: President Trump has now lined up behind the New York Amish as they take the school vaccine fight back to the Supreme Court. An HHS spokesperson told the New York Post that Trump’s recent executive order reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to parental choice and religious freedom on childhood vaccination, and that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department will keep working to protect parents who refuse shots on religious grounds. However, that federal backing does not erase New York’s $118,000 in fines or the Second Circuit’s latest loss for the Amish, but it gives the families a White House ally they did not have when the case began.
Still this is a First Amendment violation in plain sight. The Free Exercise Clause does not expire when a legislature calls sincere belief “fake” or “garbage,” or when a governor tells a congregation that objectors “aren’t listening to God.” Neutral and generally applicable is the slogan they hide behind while they keep secular carve outs and pile daily $2,000 hits on isolated parochial schools. The Founders wrote the amendment so the state could not pick a religion it disliked and fine it into exile. If New York can do this to the Amish, the living test of American tolerance, then the right to worship according to conscience is already on the auction block.
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