Welcome to the Napa Legal Podcast, where we discuss religious liberty from the perspective of faith-based nonprofits.

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In this week's episode, Frank DeVito and Kyle Nazareth discuss an Idaho district court finding a narrow but fundamental Fourteenth Amendment right to abortion three years after Dobbs, Becket's new lawsuit against SUNY Broome Community College on behalf of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and a Philadelphia school "quiet room" that allegedly became a Muslim prayer space where non-Muslim students were disciplined for entering.

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In this episode, we discuss:

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[2:18] Seyb v. Members of the Idaho Board of Medicine, now before the Ninth Circuit. Frank traces how the court gets there, from nineteenth-century mens rea requirements and life-of-the-mother exceptions to the claim that these show a fundamental limit on legislative power, and argues the leap is the whole error: a legislature declining to criminalize something is not a court recognizing a right it cannot touch.

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[20:06] Becket sues SUNY Broome Community College after it denied recognition to an InterVarsity chapter over the chapter's requirement that student leaders share its Christian beliefs. Kyle works through the fourteen counts, including church autonomy and entanglement, the free exercise claims aimed at strict scrutiny, Tandon's most-favored-nation rule, and Fulton's holding that mere discretion defeats general applicability.

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[35:35] Heister v. School District of Philadelphia, where a district judge partially denied the school district's motion to dismiss on August 21. Frank uses the case to raise a cultural asymmetry while cautioning against judgment when the facts are this contested, and Kyle asks whether the flag is a religious symbol at all.

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The Napa Legal Podcast, September 1, 2026

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#freedomofreligion #religiousliberty #freeexercise

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