Connecticut just told parents their religious beliefs are optional.

A Superior Court judge this week upheld that no religious exemptions from the vaccines required to send your kid to school will be allowed so roll up your sleeves punk and take what Big Pharma demand, no matter what you believe.

Public Act 21-6, passed in 2021. A lawsuit filed by two parents in 2022 argued the ban violated the state constitution and Connecticut’s own Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. After years of litigation, the final claim was dismissed. While the case dragged on, lawmakers passed yet another bill clarifying that the Religious Freedom Act simply does not apply to school vaccine rules. Case closed.

Lindy Urso, the attorney for the parents, put it plainly: “What the plaintiffs were hoping for was basic, fundamental religious liberty.” He called the outcome “appalling… cowardly… disgraceful,” and said the founders would be rolling in their graves. One of the main reasons they came here and declared independence was religious freedom. He’s not wrong.

Attorney General William Tong, on the other hand, was “relieved and not surprised.” His explanation: “States can use police power to keep people safe. You can be upset as you want to be in the privacy of your own home. Don’t put people at risk and get them sick.”

There it is. The official position of the state of Connecticut is that your sincere religious convictions about what goes into your child’s body are fine…so long as you keep them private and don’t act on them when the government decides otherwise. The moment those convictions conflict with a school vaccine schedule, they become a public-health hazard to be overridden by “police power.”

Now factor in the detail the officials never want to discuss that some of the vaccines required for school entry like rubella, varicella, and certain others were developed or produced using cell lines descended from aborted human fetuses. That’s not fringe. It’s in the medical literature. For parents whose faith teaches that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, and that using products derived from that act is morally compromised, this is not a technicality. It is the core of the objection. Connecticut’s response is to erase the exemption entirely, then pass a second law making sure no religious-freedom statute can be used to challenge it.

Most states still allow religious exemptions. Connecticut is one of the handful that do not. The message is clear that the state’s interest in universal compliance outweighs the right of parents to raise their children according to their deepest moral and religious beliefs. You can believe whatever you want at home. Just don’t expect to exercise it at the schoolhouse door.

This is not neutral public health. It is the government deciding that certain religious claims are illegitimate the moment they inconvenience the bureaucracy. The founders didn’t fight a revolution so that future attorneys general could lecture citizens that their faith is fine as long as it stays private and never interferes with “police power.” If religious liberty only exists when it doesn’t cost the state anything, then it doesn’t exist at all.

Right now, about three percent of children are homeschooled in Connecticut. Keep that number moving up, folks.