Increasingly, "religious exemption" appears to translate as "get out of xxx free card." We've seen it with bakers and florists who think their religion means they can discriminate against LGBT customers, with employers who want to exclude birth control from their employees' health coverage (and with Supreme Court justices who embrace that logic). Now, we see that religious exemptions are also hitting public health as parents use them to get out of vaccinating their kids. The problem is, once again, people don't have to have a sincere and consistent religious position on vaccinations,
they just have to claim they do:
The anti-vaccine group National Vaccine Information Center, which pushes the debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism, advises parents with “sincerely held” personal and spiritual beliefs against vaccination to claim religious exemptions. The group’s president, Barbara Loe Fisher, offered strategies for doing just that in a 2011 conversation with Dr. Joseph Mercola, who runs a controversial alternative medicine website.
"You do not have to belong to a 'church' or an organized religion that 'officially opposes vaccination' to take a religious exemption to vaccination," Fisher said, marking air quotes with her hands around certain phrases. "States that have legal language that restrict your ability to take a religious exemption to vaccination based on the fact, for example, you don't belong to a church -- whenever that's been challenged at the high court level it's always been found to be unconstitutional."
Among major organized religions, Christian Scientists may be the only group to have a clear, solid case for religious exemption, given their general avoidance of doctors. But hey, who cares? Your sincerely held, if completely unsupported by participation in a church that opposes vaccinations, belief that it would be bad to vaccinate your kids trumps other people's sincerely held belief that it would be terrible if their kids got measles because of your refusal to vaccinate.