[generally]

"The court was not asking the defendants to declare their religious beliefs, just to explain whether those religious beliefs were the motivation for the ID policy they adopted.

...and, the court's authority to do so rests on the fact that the defendants put their religious motivations at issue."

This would be an excellent result, if it now enabled us to go after schools that push the Muslim agenda. How about a little "separation of church and state" where Islam is concerned? Why is it ok to teach the pillars of Islam in public schools?

[Steve_Seattle]

"The court was not asking the defendants to declare their religious beliefs, just to explain whether those religious beliefs were the motivation for the ID policy they adopted.

The court was thus acting improperly. It was never the intent of the Framers that the Constitution be interpreted to prohibit people from having a religious motivation for their behavior, even when acting in a public capacity. What was prohibited was sectarianism, i.e., requiring membership in, or granting favorable status to, a particular sect. One example was the founding of the Thanksgiving holiday - a day set aside by the government for people to give thanks to God (and not to the Indians, or for our good fortune, as some revisionists would have you believe). People might have a religious motivation for all sorts of legitimate acts - ending slavery, protecting the environment, promoting equal rights for women - and to pretend that the Constitution requires that these motivations somehow be expunged from our thinking is absolutely false. To begin with, it is impossible, and the Constitution does not demand the impossible.