Walter, good points, and our divergent views reveal our differing ways of reading the Constitution. Of course, your way is legally and practically correct, but a guy can dream. You — “the Constitution says what the Supreme Court says it says.” Me — “the Constitution says what it says.”

As a policy issue I would want the city to let Catholic Social Services participate in their foster care system. The more adoptions the better. But I don’t live there so I don’t have a say.

As a legal issue, can Philadelphia have non-discrimination rules for its contractors? Can the courts force them to do business with someone they don’t wish to? If so, how do you distinguish that from forcing the baker to bake that cake or the photographer from documenting a same-sex wedding?

Policy differences shouldn’t be decided by the courts.

Since Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment to the Constitution does *not* create a right of religious exemption to generally applicable and neutrally intended laws. Now, it may be that the plaintiffs in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia can point to real difficulties in applying that doctrine, and can argue in all good faith that the Court should consider returning to the then-majority views of Justice Brennan in the days of Sherbert and Yoder. But to state as if a truism that the First Amendment “already… does that” is to assume that such an argument has already proved victorious, and that the Court has in fact overturned Employment Division v. Smith — which it hasn’t. To overturn that case, one would need to overcome Justice Scalia’s arguments that accommodation is best worked out through the political process, an implication of which, in our system of federalism, is the likelihood that there will not be a single uniform standard of accommodation that prevails from coast to coast.