The Supreme Court declined a case challenging California’s ban on state-funded travel to Texas and other states that allow Christian adoption and foster care agencies to refuse service to gay and transgender couples on Monday.
The court shut down the case in an unsigned order. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, writing that he did not have any opinions on the facts of the case but that he was displeased that the court did not exercise its original jurisdiction powers.
“I express no view regarding any of those claims, but I respectfully dissent from the Court’s refusal even to permit the filing of Texas’s complaint,” Alito wrote.
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The dispute arose out of a 2016 ban in which California forbade state-sponsored or -funded travel to any state that passes laws voiding or impeding nondiscrimination protections for people on the basis of sexual orientation or identity. In 2017, Texas passed a law ordering state agencies and local governments against taking “any adverse action” against child placement groups that decline to serve a couple based on the group’s “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
California put its ban on 10 states, including Texas. In its lawsuit against California, Texas argued that the ban reflected religious animus and that it violated the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause, interstate commerce clause, and guarantees of equal protection.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said after filing the state’s complaint to the Supreme Court that the Texas law is intended to let the state “partner with as many different agencies as possible to expand the number of safe and loving homes available to foster children.”
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“Boycotting states based on nothing more than political disagreement breaks down the ability of states to serve as laboratories of democracy while still working together as one nation, the very thing our Constitution intended to prevent,” Paxton said.
The case reached the court just as the justices considered whether a Catholic Pennsylvania foster care agency violated Philadelphia’s nondiscrimination laws by adhering to church teaching in its practice by not recognizing gay marriages.
