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Page Number: 15

10 

GONZALES v. O CENTRO ESPIRITA BENEFICENTE 
UNIAO DO VEGETAL 
Opinion of the Court 

Court  looked  beyond  broadly  formulated  interests  justify-
ing the general applicability of government mandates and 
scrutinized  the asserted harm of granting specific exemp-
tions  to  particular  religious  claimants.  In  Yoder,  for  ex-
ample,  we  permitted  an  exemption  for  Amish  children 
from a compulsory school attendance law.  We recognized
that  the  State  had  a  “paramount”  interest  in  education, 
but held that “despite its admitted validity in the general-
ity  of  cases,  we  must  searchingly  examine  the  interests 
that the State seeks to promote . . . and the impediment to 
those  objectives  that  would  flow  from  recognizing  the 
claimed Amish exemption.”  406 U. S., at 213, 221 (empha-
sis added).  The Court explained that the State needed “to 
show  with  more  particularity  how  its  admittedly  strong 
interest  . . .  would  be  adversely  affected  by  granting  an 
exemption to the Amish.”  Id., at 236 (emphasis added). 

In  Sherbert,  the  Court  upheld  a  particular  claim  to  a 
religious  exemption  from  a  state  law  denying  unemploy-
ment benefits to those who would not work on Saturdays, 
but explained that it was not announcing a constitutional
right  to  unemployment  benefits  for  “all  persons  whose
religious  convictions  are  the  cause  of  their  unemploy-
ment.”  374  U. S.,  at  410  (emphasis  added).    The  Court 
distinguished  the  case  “in  which  an  employee’s  religious 
convictions serve to make him a nonproductive member of 
society.” 
Ibid.;  see  also  Smith,  494  U. S.,  at  899 
(O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment) (strict scrutiny “at 
least  requires  a  case-by-case  determination  of  the  ques-
tion,  sensitive  to  the  facts  of  each  particular  claim”). 
Outside  the  Free  Exercise  area  as  well,  the  Court  has 
noted  that  “[c]ontext  matters”  in  applying  the  compelling 
interest test, Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 327 (2003), 
and has emphasized that “strict scrutiny does take ‘relevant 
differences’  into  account—indeed,  that  is  its  fundamental 
purpose,” Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U. S. 200, 
228 (1995).