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Judge blocks Washington requirement for priests to report child abuse disclosed in confession
(washingtonstatestandard.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Not reporting a crime is not the same thing as committing that crime. The issue here is that Catholic priests have a religious obligation not to report crimes they find out about in certain specific circumstances, and this law would prevent them from fulfilling that obligation. There's no claim that actually attacking children is a religious obligation, or that it would be constitutionally protected if it were.
not reporting a crime is inaction, committing a crime is action. the trolley problem is basically about this exact question.
That's only true of certain situations and I'm of the opinion that this is not one of them. I've had this exact discussion on here recently so sorry if I skip all the Wikipedia hyperlinks, feel free to trawl through my comments if you really need them lol. Suffice it to say aiding & abetting laws and criminal accessory laws both provide means of charging people with knowledge of criminal activity with the crimes committed, circumstantially of course. I see absolutely no reason why the guys helping rapists feel better about raping shouldn't be held criminally liable. Freedom of religion, like freedom of speech and the press and assembly and all that, is not absolute and necessarily has limits. It's why you don't see a lot of human sacrifice-based religions in the US. At least not mainstream ones. Your freedom to express yourself religiously ends weeeeell before my freedom to not have my children raped.