WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Supreme Court rejected without comment a legal challenge to a 2021 Connecticut law that eliminated religious exemptions to school immunization requirements, continuing the current court’s aversion to touching state-level vaccine mandates.

In 2021, Connecticut changed its immunization requirements for participation in public and private schools, daycare, and other childcare centers by eliminating the ability to obtain religious exemptions, leaving medical exemptions the only possible avenue to avoid objectionable injections. 

Several religious institutions such as Milford Christian Church, which maintains a pre-kindergarten program called Little Eagles and a K-12 Academy, sued the Connecticut State Department of Education, Connecticut Office of Early Childhood, and Connecticut Department of Public Health on First Amendment grounds after being given a choice to either compel student vaccinations, expel those who refused, or risk being forced to close.

In January 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Janet Bond Arterton dismissed one such lawsuit on the grounds that the law change was not driven by “religious animus,” prompting the plaintiffs to appeal to the Supreme Court.

But the June 24 order list published by the nation’s highest court confirmed that We the Patriots USA, et al, v. CT Early Childhood Dev. et al. has been dismissed, without any elaboration. How individual justices voted was not listed, but with just four votes necessary to take a case, at least six would have voted not to.

“This is the end of the road to a challenge to Connecticut’s lifesaving and fully lawful vaccine requirements,” Democratic Attorney General William Tong said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. “We have said all along, and the courts have affirmed, the legislature acted responsibly and well within its authority to protect the health of Connecticut families and to stop the spread of preventable disease.”

“WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN, and we will not lose hope. We know that there is a Divine plan in all of this, and that ‘all things work together unto good’ (Romans 8:28). Even in this loss, in fact, there is some good news,” responded We the Patriots, which represented Milford Christian Church and Little Eagles Preschool & Daycare. “Our case against the State of Connecticut to restore religious exemptions was not fully dismissed by the Second Circuit, which allowed one of our claims to proceed – i.e., that a child with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) is entitled to an education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The Second Circuit sent this claim back to the district court for trial, but it has been on hold pending the outcome of our cert petition at the Supreme Court.”

“If we are ultimately victorious in these two cases, students with disabilities and students at private religious schools would be able to opt out of vaccinations and receive an education in Connecticut,” the group noted. “A victory in either of these cases at the Second Circuit would also apply to students in New York, which lost its school religious exemption in 2019. Although it’s not the broad, sweeping victory we were aiming for, these cases could still open the door for hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of children to receive an education in New York and Connecticut.”

Several common vaccines, including for hepatitis A and rabies, were developed using cell lines derived from aborted babies, leading many Americans to morally object to receiving anything tainted by the intentional destruction of innocent human life.

The issue is particularly acute today due to ongoing controversies surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed and released in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.

According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used aborted fetal cells during their COVID vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design & development and production phases. While many have attempted to deny or downplay the coronavirus jabs’ links to abortion, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science and the left-wing fact-checking outlet Snopes have both admitted the connection.

Meanwhile, the ruling continues the Supreme Court’s trend of issuing decidedly mixed rulings from a conservative perspective, despite Republican presidents having appointed six of its nine current members.

The Court has delivered conservatives major victories on gun rights, environmental regulation, affirmative action, and most significantly abortion with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but it has also issued dismissive rulings on religious freedom, LGBT ideology, and more to the point, that conservative Justice Samuel Alito has taken the rare step of criticizing Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh for lacking the “fortitude” to resolve such issues. 

In the area of vaccine mandates, in 2022 the Court blocked the Biden administration from forcing private businesses to mandate COVID shots while upholding a mandate for healthcare workers at federally funded facilities. On state-level mandates, the court has been consistently more deferential.

Kavanaugh and Barrett have voted against taking up reviews of state-level vaccine mandates in Indiana, Maine, and New York, and Kavanaugh voted to uphold a federal vaccine mandate for healthcare workers and against a group of Navy SEALs’ bid for a religious exemption. Last fall, the Court also rejected a COVID-19 vaccine mandate case out of New Jersey, again without listing how individual justices ruled.