See, this is exactly what I mean

I wasn’t just throwing out absurd hypotheticals in my post a few days ago about Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this as an example to use then, but — remember that Swedish group that’s founded a religion which holds “the copying of files to be a sacrament, all copyrights to be heresy and the sharing of music, movies and other forms of protected media to be a kind of holy devotion”? What they’ve done is, they’ve essentially just picked a law (or set of laws) they don’t like and called breaking that law their “religion.”

Now, the laws concerning religious freedom in Sweden are not exactly like those in the US, as this New Yorker Culture Desk post explains:

In Sweden, the separation of church and state became law on January 1, 2000, the day that the Lutheran Church of Sweden stopped being the official state church. Since then, a government agency called the Kammarkollegiet has accepted applications for the legal recognition of religions. “They don’t make any kind of assessment of what the beliefs are, and the association is not sanctioned by the state,” Anders Bäckström, a professor of the sociology of religion at Uppsala University, told me. But the recognition of Kopimism, he said, is “a new situation. We haven’t seen anything of its kind before.”  …

For the Missionary Church of Kopimism, which holds up privacy as one of its chief values, [the scrutiny which comes with being a registered religion] could be a big problem, and it’s not clear what they’ll gain from registration. “We don’t really get any formal rights or benefits,” Gerson said. “We can apply for the right to marry people. There is government aid we can apply for, but we have no such plans today. I don’t, at least.” Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate Party founder, speculated that if the Church incorporated the seal of confession into its rites, members could take advantage of the confidentiality that comes with certain privileged conversations. Generally, though, Sweden offers few legal exemptions for religious practice. No one, Gerson included, has any expectation that registration will exempt Church members from copyright law. “What the registration has done mostly is strengthen our identity,” Gerson said. “I think it will be easier to find new members now that we’re recognized.”

But imagine that the Missionary Church of Kopimism were to spread to the United States. How should the US recognize, or not recognize, the practice of their faith? If we stand by the decision made in the Hosanna-Tabor case, we would have to say that the First Amendment protects the right of religious organizations to choose who runs their worship services and how they do it. If their most basic tenets require that criminals (violators of copyright law) be present for religious ceremonies, and that those ceremonies involve more criminal acts — who are we to stop them?

Maybe you think that we can uphold the “ministerial exception” for violators of disability rights law, but copyright law is outside the bounds of reasonable interpretation here. To you I ask: why? What is the line you can draw between these different types of laws, and what is the legal basis you are invoking for that distinction? What if I found a new religion called the Church of Discrimination, which has no other beliefs except that it is morally obligatory to discriminate on the basis of race and gender when hiring?