Religious Liberty and the American Founding, with Phil Munoz

Published: April 20, 2023, 6:46 p.m.

b'This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Groff vs. Dejoy, involving a Post Office mail carrier named Gerald Groff, who, for religious reasons, wished not to work on Sundays. Previously the postal service had granted this accommodation, which was easy back when the Post Office didn\\u2019t do mail delivery on Sundays. But a few years ago the Post Office started contracting with Amazon and other package delvery services to do Sunday deliveries, though they still granted Groff his religious accommodation. But then the Post Office changed its mind and compelled Groff to work Sundays. Hence this case, raising again an aspect of the First Amendment\\u2019s free exercise clause.

You would think after all these decades of both religious liberty cases and employment law cases that such a situation would be well-settled, but you would be wrong. In fact the First Amendment\\u2019s clauses related to the establishment and free exercise of religious remain highly contested and unsettled.

One person who has a deep grasp of the broader issue is Vincent Phillip Munoz, who is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of political science and law at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is \\u201cReligious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment\\u2019s Religion Clauses.\\u201d Phil\\u2019s work has been cited in several Supreme Court opinions on the issue.

Phil sat down recently with John Yoo and me to discuss the issue, and the wider issue of how constitutional originalism should be understood today. You could think of this episode as a \\u201ctwo-whisky happy hour,\\u201d as we wanted to have Lucretia Zoom in, but she wasn\\u2019t able to, so Phil got off the hook. But in any case, let\\u2019s turn to Phil now.

Note: Apologies for the background static and other sound issues. We had our communal microphone on the wrong settings, and it was not amenable to a post-production fix.'